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OTHER BOOKS BY SAME AUTHOR 


FARES, PLEASE! 

STUDIES IN THE PARABLES OF JESUS 
CHRISTIAN CRUSADE FOR WORLD DEMOCRACY 
NEW MAP OF THE WORLD 
THE MID-WEEK SERVICE (With Wabben F. Cook) 




SKYLINES 


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BY 

HALFORD E.^UCCOCK 


II 



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THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 













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Copyright, 1923, by 
HALFORD E. LUCCOCK 


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Printed in the United States of America 


FEB -3 1323 
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TO 

NATALIE AND ETHEL 






CONTENTS 


PAOB 

I. Cook’s Tours. 11 

II. Skylines. 24 

III. Rules for Giving a Party. 34 

IV. Trains of Thought. 48 

V. Seven Years’ Bad Luck. 62 

VI. Dead Languages. 76 

VII. A Plea for the Conservation op 

Some Old-Fashioned Diseases. 90 

VIII. The Higher Hooliganism. 102 

IX. The Apostolic Succession at Glen. . 115 

X. The Funeral March of a Marion¬ 
ette. 126 

XI. What are the Wild Waves Saying?. 137 

XII. Games for Grown-Ups. 148 

XIIL Finishing Schools. 163 

XIV. The Advertising Man Talks. 177 
















OVERTURE 

A YOUNG man once went to a Scotch 
music teacher to have his voice tried out. 
The teacher explored all the possibilities for 
half an hour and then threw up his hands in 
despair. 

“It’s no use/’ he said. “I’ve tried you on the 
white keys and tried you on the black. I give 
up. You must be singing between the cracks!” 

The papers in this volume do not strike the 
Major notes of high solemnities. Nor yet do 
they hum in a Minor Key. 

They are just a few chords between the 
cracks. 



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I 


COOK’S TOUES 


A RE you taking a Cook’s Tour or are you 
going ^on your own’?” asks the purser. 
That is the Previous Question for all globe¬ 
trotters whether they trot to the ends of the 
earth or only down Main Street. Everyman’s 
Pilgrim Progress is either a Cook’s Tour with 
a machine-made itinerary, safe and painless, 
or a venture ^^on your own.” Not that we 
have a chance to decide the question as our 
little craft puts out on its voyage. Far from 
it. The ^^Grand Tour” of life never becomes 
as simple as the process of buying a steamship 
ticket of a certain kind. Many a man has come 
to harbor after an eighty-years’ cruise with¬ 
out ever realizing that he has been following 
docilely a schedule of trips and stops laid out 
carefully by others and rigidly adhered to. 
He has been on a personally conducted tour, 
with a complete set of predigested thoughts 

11 


12 


SKYLINES 


and exclamations thrown in to be vocalized at 
the points indicated. He has gone through 
life with about as much adventurous initiative 
as an express package tagged and ticketed and 
safely delivered. 

Now, I would be the last man wittingly to 
injure the business of Thomas Cook and Sons. 
I have never had the honor of knowing Mr. 
Thomas Cook or any of his estimable sons, 
yet my heart leaps up when I behold their 
names upon a sign. I would be an ingrate 
were I even to forget a day in a far port when 
their good-Samaritan mail-forwarding genius 
delivered to me a letter which, faint yet pur¬ 
suing, had trailed me through several coun¬ 
tries, a letter which brought hope, breakfast, 
and speaking terms with a First National 
Bank somewhere (provided I didn^t speak too 
long). 

A Cook’s Tour has served thousands of pil¬ 
grims as a shock absorber; almost as a flowery 
bed of ease in which unadventurous souls may 
be carried to the sky of foreign lands. It hits 
all the high spots in proper order. Cook’s 
tourists need never worry whether it is Rome 
or Florence, or whether they are looking at 
pictures in the Louvre or Uffizi gallery. The 


COOK'S TOURS 


13 


guide knows and it will come out all right in 
the end. It is so easy and makes less wear 
and tear on the mind and nerve. Yet travel 
a la Cook has costs other than money. The 
tripper misses things here and there. He 
misses the thrill of wondering whether he will 
ever get where he started for, and how badly 
broke he will be when he arrives. He misses 
the glorious freedom of choosing the particu¬ 
lar brand of hotel bandit he prefers to be rob¬ 
bed by. He cannot follow the lure of beck¬ 
oning roads which coquette with him, for he is 
due at the next ^^point of interest." He must 
swarm with the hive when it swarms into the 
next gallery and register awe and ejaculate 
^^Ah” before the next picture. 

It is undeniably easier to go through life on 
a Cook's Tour than to zigzag through fifty 
years in company with the eternal question, 
Where Do We Go Prom Here?" The other 
day a man in New York got on a Broadway 
street car at 34th Street, paid his fare, rode 
across the street and got off at the other side. 
He said to the bewildered conductor, “I would 
rather pay a dollar than play football with 
that gang on the street." He much preferred 
to let the street car get him across the street 


14 


SKYLINES 


than to take the risk of making an end run 
around the crowd in mass formation, or risk¬ 
ing a center rush on his own initiative. It is 
so much easier to hop on to some convenient 
theory or political party, doctrine, or creed 
and leave all the responsibility and trouble 
of thinking to the motorman. New York city 
is considering a comprehensive plan for traffic 
regulation which contemplates the control of 
all street traffic for five miles in length from 
one central signal station. All vehicles in this 
area will stop and start when some invisible 
god flashes a light. In these days of propa¬ 
ganda and canned thinking vast multitudes 
move at the flashing lights of some invisible 
but colossal traffic director who flashes the 
lights to the copy room and then out over the 
country. He flashes red and the mob responds 
in a tremor of abhorrence at Bolshevism. He 
flashes white and the mob moves on with a re¬ 
assured delight in one hundred per cent 
Americanism as per schedule. 

As one watches the crowd streaming into a 
city in the morning, if he is at all cynical he 
is tempted to think that the majority are tak¬ 
ing a Cook’s Tour through life. You can al¬ 
most read the water-mark on their brows— 


COOKES TOURS 


15 


Cook d Sons No. 999.’’ There will hardly 
be a thought all day which has not been care¬ 
fully prepared by others. The problem of 
what they shall wear on their bodies has been 
decided for them by the twin gods of manu¬ 
facturing and advertising. And what they 
shall wear on their minds has also been de¬ 
cided by the same twin geniuses. What they 
shall laugh at was decided six months before 
by the deities of Hollywood, California, while 
the magazine with the new number of a mil¬ 
lion subscribers every week and newspapers 
designed for ^^the nine-year-old mind^’ stamp 
them like a giant steam roller, leaving men 
and women almost as much alike and as ani¬ 
mated as a row of celluloid dolls. 

Probably the majority of the average citi¬ 
zens always take a Cook’s Tour when they 
enter the Industrial world. The sight-seeing 
tour of the present industrial situation is con¬ 
ducted by the (not very) Tired Business Man. 
The tourists are chaperoned as efficiently as a 
girl’s finishing school on a shopping trip. They 
see what should be seen through the appro¬ 
priate colored glasses and go through the 
proper reactions. The words “labor union” 
bring to their mind the appropriate reaction 


16 


SKYLINES 


—^^outside agitator’’ The man with decided 
convictions on peace is gummed with a label 
^^sentimentalist.” Those interested in democ¬ 
racy in industry are ^^dangerous reds.” The 
beauty of the system is the economy of energy. 
These reactions can be secured again and 
again without a single wrinkle of the gray 
matter being disturbed. It is efficiency to the 
nth power. Meanwhile the great problems of 
the human side of industry have never been 
glimpsed. 

The church is thronged with men and women 
taking their religion as a Cook’s Tour already 
marked out for them. It causes them no 
bother. Joseph Parker once said, ‘^The church 
is a great brick-maker.” It has shaped men 
and women into the same conventional mold. 
“Theirs not to reason why”; theirs merely to 
accept the form handed down as the authorized 
schedule. We have all been to parties which 
seemed full of wax figures sitting along the 
wall eating ice cream. We have been quite 
surprised later that some of the wax figures 
were really live, human beings. Even so dar¬ 
ing an adventure as reciting the Apostles’ 
Creed has been made a sleepy and monotonous 
Cook’s Tour. They pass thoughtlessly over 


COOKES TOURS 


17 


the great heights of human experience like pas¬ 
sengers going over the Alps at night in a sleep¬ 
ing car. Sometimes, thank God, reciting the 
creed is the great adventure which it ought to 
be and trembling lips repeat, believe in the 
life everlasting/^ as a daring mariner in the 
days of discovery rounded “Cape No” in the 
teeth of the gale. Such an affirmation of faith 
is an experience like Magellan’s plowing 
through the lonely and limitless Pacific ninety 
days without sight of land. One who repeats 
that great affirmation, “7 believe in God the 
Father Almighty/’ in the face of the desola¬ 
tion and woe that covers the earth, has an ex¬ 
perience like the climb of Balboa up the jag¬ 
ged hills of Panama until he reached the peak 
from which he could see the vast stretches of 
the Pacific. So it is the same rare experience 
of the spirit that climbs up the hard facts of 
life until one surmounts them and can view 
that love of God whose breadth is like the 
wideness of the sea. 

There is another kind of Cook’s Tour, how¬ 
ever, which should not be forgotten and that 
is the “Grand Tour” taken by Captain James 
Cook with his valiant ship, the “Resolution 
and Adventure.” When that stout-hearted 


18 


SKYLINES 


English mariner pushed the prow of his vessel 
into the channel waters of the South Pacific, 

“He was the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea.” 

That is the kind of a Cook’s Tour—the ven¬ 
ture of a gentleman unafraid—to which Jesus 
called men when he asked them to follow him. 
He that loseth his life shall find it. Keligion 
is a grand tour of the mysteries of the unseen. 
It is not the kind of a ^^grand tour” which was 
so popular a few centuries ago in England, 
that of a young man journeying over Europe 
in order to secure superficial polish. Pure 
religion and undefiled is more like the grand 
tour of Europe conducted by that prince of 
personal conductors, John J. Pershing, who 
led a host of Americans in a memorable tour 
of northern France in behalf of the world. The 
voyage of life is not a picnic but a crusade. 
The Christian life does not find its true symbol 
in a Sunday-school picnic at a pleasure resort, 
but, rather, in such a crusade as that in which 
millions of young men offered freely their 
lives. Thomas Carlyle had the heart of Chris¬ 
tian philosophy when he said: ^^Life is not a 
Maygame, but a battle and a march, a warfare 


COOK’S TOURS 


19 


with principalities and powers. No idle prom¬ 
enade through fragrant orange groves and 
green flowery spaces, waited on by coral 
muses, and the rosy hours; it is a stern pilgrim¬ 
age through the rough, burning, sandy soli¬ 
tudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice.’’ A 
Cook’s Tour in religious thinking and activity 
sacrifices on the altar of conventionality the 
great heritage of real life. How many mis¬ 
shaped lives can well be described in the verses 
of Agnes Lee: 

“The snow is lying very deep, 

My house is sheltered from the blast, 

I hear each muffled step outside, 

I hear each voice go past. 

But I’ll not venture in the drift 
Out of this bright security. 

Till enough footsteps tread it down 
To make a path for me.” 

Far better than such an epitaph is the glori¬ 
ous phrase left by Sir Francis Drake when he 
spoke of ^^Sailing the seas with God.” Per¬ 
haps Francis Drake does not stand out in our 
memory particularly for godliness. Neverthe¬ 
less, that expression of him who wrought so 
valiantly in the English Channel against the 


20 


SKYLINES 


powers of darkness makes a sturdy model to 
guide by. 

Dorothy Canfield says very keenly: ^^Lots 
of old accepted notions look to me like a good 
big dose of soothing syrup to get people safely 
past the time in their existences when they 
might do some sure enough personal living 
on their own hook.’^ 

Unless we do make ventures on our own ac¬ 
count which win for us some real religious 
experience, whether we be preachers or lay¬ 
men, we will go through life talking about 
Christianity without even having tasted the 
real thing; just as hungry men are frequently 
to be seen in the streets carrying signs on 
their backs advertising a big dinner which 
they have never even smelled. 

The self-appointed guardians of opinion 
and belief in our churches are active agents 
seeking to herd the passengers on this whirl¬ 
ing globe into Cook’s Tours. They view with 
alarm any excursions taken on one’s own in¬ 
itiative and responsibility. They point with 
pride to those who walk in lock-step forma¬ 
tion. They seek to make the itinerary of the 
pilgrim between the City of Destruction and 
the Celestial City a straight and sheltered 


COOK’S TOURS 


21 


one, passing over the 'deserts of platitude. 
They frown on all pioneering. Usually such 
guardians of the Ark regard a course of study 
for ministers such as is provided by the Meth¬ 
odist Church, not in the sense in which it is 
designed, as laying before the mind of the 
growing student Christian points of view, but 
as a rigid summary of opinions to be heroi¬ 
cally gulped. Consequently, they are shy at 
any expression of opinion which was not on 
the itinerary which they have followed. They 
are willing that the young preachers shall be 
led through the green pastures of John Wes¬ 
ley’s Sermons and the still waters of the 
Methodist Discipline. But they flee from the 
theological Bad Lands of the modern appre¬ 
hension of Christianity. 

What the church needs tremendously is a 
new generation of Elizabethan Sea Dogs— 
preachers who are willing to steer the prow 
of the church into the rough waters of pres¬ 
ent-day life in the spirit of Drake, Howard, 
Raleigh, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert. 

One great disadvantage of present-day 
drives and movements in the church is that 
they tend to transform the quickening experi¬ 
ence of worship into a Cook’s Tour over a long 


22 


SKYLINES 


itinerary of ^^special days” which follow each 
other with all the monotony of a railroad time¬ 
table. The congregation becomes somewhat 
like the occupant of a sight-seeing car in which 
all the details of various organizations are 
pointed out through a megaphone announcing 
alternatively, ^^On your right you see the For¬ 
eign Mission Society which has 109,174 mem¬ 
bers and furnished 214,999 meals last year in 
23 different languages.” Followed next Sun¬ 
day by, ‘^On your left you see the Tract and 
Publication Society which produced last year 
84,911,688 pages of printed literature.” It is 
reported (on poor authority) that the San¬ 
hedrin of one promotion agency was once 
humiliated to discover that the month of 
March, instead of having four Sundays, as any 
respectable month should have, had five, and 
the fifth Sunday was left entirely unprovided 
for! Consternation reigned, for there was no 
telling what might happen if the congregation 
had a whole Sunday at leisure to worship God! 

A composer once wrote a piece containing a 
long part for the cornet player. The piece 
was first rate in every way except that it could 
not possibly be played, because the composer 
did not leave any place for the cornet player 


COOK’S TOURS 


23 


to tate a breath. Frequently a local congre¬ 
gation is trying to sound out the cornet play¬ 
er’s notes without having a chance to stop to 
fill its lungs with a breath of inspiration. 

If you are looking for a voyage worth while, 
better sign up for the cruise with Captain 
Cook, Merchant Adventurer, rather than with 
his de luxe modern descendants, Thomas and 
Sons. 


II 


SKYLINES 

% 

I F you no longer believe that there is a pot 
of gold out at the foot of the rainbow, the 
years that bring the philosophic mind have 
played you a shabby trick. For it would take 
more philosophy than will keep without spoil¬ 
ing to compensate for the loss of so important 
an item from the Thirty-nine Articles of Be¬ 
lief once delivered to the Saints under Six. 

Besides, if the years really have brought you 
the philosophic mind, and not merely its usual 
substitute, hardening of the arteries, you have 
learned that the inward and spiritual truth 
of which the fairy tale was the outward and 
visible sign is that the glory of life lies on 
its horizons. It is at the skyline, that hazy 
borderland between the earth and sky, between 
the seen and the unseen, where a golden haze 
of mystical feeling softens the rigid lines of 
our world of fact, that the true fairy gold is to 
be found. 


24 


SKYLINES 


25 


^^Distrust first impulses/’ said the cynical 
Talleyrand; ‘^they are nearly always right.” 
The first impulse we had to mate a Pilgrim’s 
Progress to the foot of the rainbow was right 
at any rate, only we never dreamed what a 
wonderful pot of gold was there. We invari¬ 
ably looked for a little geranium pot, and 
when we really get out into the horizon in any 
direction we find a whole peach basketful. 
For the fairy lore definitely located the gold 
out at the skyline. And there, sure enough, 
it is—wealth beyond the dreams of shop-keep- 

I 

ing avarice. The eye of childhood hath not 
seen, nor ear heard, nor did it enter into the 
heart to conceive the large fulfillment which 
the years may bring to the early faith that that 
hazy line of mystery was a land of treasure. 

The thesis is an old one but a most ^‘com¬ 
fortable faith,” withal. And who will be¬ 
grudge us any morsel of comfortable faith in 
these days? It is as old as Abraham’s west¬ 
ward walk with God. It is as new as to-day’s 
venture. The true glory of life is not in the 
tangible but the intangible; not in the solid 
facts of our mental and spiritual front yard 
which we can weigh and measure, but in the 
vision of the haze which we dimly apprehend, 



26 


SKYLINES 


hazard for, and journey to. It is not in the 
things which we can compass in a cozy 
definition but in the uncharted realities we 
feel. 

Nature and her whole publicity force, the 
poets of every tongue, have been telling us 
this ever since sunsets first began. Is not the 
word ^^horizon’’ one of the most beautiful 
words in the language because the thing itself 
is one of the most beautiful things in the world 
both in nature and human life? Let but the 
picture of 

“A haze on the far horizon, 

The infinite, tender sky—’* 

be caught in a poet’s line, and the trick is 
done. We are his, and the Ancient Mariner’s 
spell, for all his long gray beard and glittering 
eye, was not more sure. 

The same glory of the October haze rests on 
the horizons of life where the known shades 
into the unknown, and the seen into the un¬ 
seen. Whoever will launch his own little 
Santa Maria and sail into the borderland 
where risk and faith and hope displace axiom 
and deductions can prove the truth. There 
the true glamour of life shines. 


SKYLINES 


27 


I 

Where friendship shades into love is one of 
life’s fairest skylines. And, heaven be praised, 
what a near, dear, and common one it is! 
Through the market place of our inner world 
a thousand and one acquaintances and busy 
traders throng. And then, some day, out of 
this world of solid sense we step into the sky 
where gravitation ceases, where a force which 
we cannot measure, ticket, or describe bears 
us on in exaltation. The splendor falls on 
castle walls and on cottage walls just as 
surely. Often without warning right into the 
midst of our prosiest day in stalks the miracle, 
unheralded and undeniable, and life becomes a 
sacrament. 

“Music I heard with you was more than music, 

And bread I ate with you was more than bread.” 

Love dissolves the solid block of earth into 
shining ether. Of course it is a venture. That 
is its glory. You cannot take out an endow¬ 
ment insurance policy on a love affair. It 
may be you shall touch the Happy Isles. It 
may be that the gulfs shall wash you down. 
But whatever the issue, whatever tempests 


28 


SKYLINES 


and tumults of the seas may come, if you hold 
the prow with steadfast hand, you will sail be¬ 
yond the sunset. 

Mr. Bairnsfather’s notable character, Alf, 
in The Better ’Ole, asks the young lady to 
whose heart he is laying siege, ‘^Aren^t we in¬ 
finities?’’ He was exactly right. People in 
love are ‘infinities.” There is an co in the per¬ 
sonal equation which cannot be solved either 
by trigonometry or calculus. It is that x 
which makes the line of least resistance be¬ 
tween two people, a sky line. 

It is our human tragedy that after travel¬ 
ing in that cloud land of ether we drop back 
to dingy, commonplace streets. A schoolboy’s 
definition of poetry was that “poetry is a 
thing we make prose out of.” 

II 

Life’s pot of gold is at the skyline where 
self-interest dissolves into sacrifice. At the 
end of the lane is the sky. Here about us is 
our real estate, the house we can touch, the 
land we can own and dig in, the coins we can 
jingle, the applause we can hear, but with all 
this solid satisfaction of the senses and the 


SKYLINES 


29 


tickling of our self-esteem, there is no pot of 
fairy gold. 

Out there at the lane’s end is the misty sky 
line, a vague haze of intangible ideas and 
values. Only as we outrun solid sense and a 
prudent regard for our advancement does life 
catch true gleams of glory. As one put it 
vividly in those early days of the Great War 
when the glory of sacrifice was so near to 
earth, describing a soldier leaving for the 
front: 


“He’s gone. 

I do not understand. 

I only know 

That, as he turned to go. 

And waved his hand, 

In his young eyes a sudden glory shone 
And I was dazzled by the sunset glow — 

And he was gone.” 

Emerson says truly, ‘^It is somewhat sad 
that a word of such sacred meaning as ^glory^ 
should now be the simplest of all words, and 
scarcely in a lifetime shall we hear it used 
Avithout disgust.” The word should be re¬ 
served for truly glorious things. 

You cannot prove the duty of self-sacrifice, 
nor its immeasurable worth; it is in the twi- 


30 


SKYLINES 


light zone and cannot be caught in any trap of 
logic. Just for that reason, because of its ven¬ 
ture, because of its prodigal risk, there is un¬ 
earthly magic in it. A noble ideal has more 
compelling power than the solidest fact. Ideas 
and ideals have always interested mankind 
more than facts, because every idea is a chal-* 
lenge. There is no sunset glory about facts. A 
straight line is the shortest distance between 
two points—that is a fact; but no one will die 
for it. We fight and die only for the things 
that cannot be proved. No one could have 
proved to the rich young ruler that his life 
would have had a priceless quality of joy if 
he had gone on to a rough life of martyrdom. 
There is no higher mathematics which could 
clinch that proposition with a neat Q. E. D. 
But in all probability there w^as in later days 
in the heart of the man an aching emptiness 
which was its own proof that he had missed 
the great chance of life. 

The human heart leaps to the call of the 
deep when an appeal to the capacity for self- 
sacrifice in a daring effort is made. When, in 
our own time, the late Sir Ernest Shackleton 
proposed a tramp across the antarctic conti¬ 
nent, incidentally calling in at the south pole, 


SKYLINES 


31 


he was astonished at the eagerness of men to 
accompany him. was,” he says, ‘^deluged 
with applications. One would have thought 
that a march through snow and ice for more 
than two thousand miles was the dizziest cli¬ 
max of human happiness and aspiration. The 
occupants of seats in the House of Lords and 
the heirs to some of the proudest titles of 
which the British aristocracy can boast offered 
to serve in the most menial capacity if only 
they might be allowed to join the heroic enter¬ 
prise. Naval and military officers volunteered 
to resign their commissions without reward or 
recompense of any kind if only their names 
were accepted.” 

Mr. Burnham, the great American archi¬ 
tect, once gave his fellow craftsmen a noble 
word of advice which applies to all craftsmen 
in the art of life: ^^Make no little plans. They 
have no magic to stir men’s blood, and prob¬ 
ably themselves will not be realized. Make 
big plans, aim high in hope, and work, remem¬ 
bering that a noble logical diagram once re¬ 
corded will never die.” These words are an 
echo of the life specifications of the Great 
Architect—“He that loseth his life shall find 
it.” 


32 


SKYLINES 


III 

The golden glow of human experience is 
found on the skyline where knowledge shades 
off into faith. What is ofttimes complained of 
as the great drawback of religion is that it 
cannot be proved. That is its glittering lure. 
Otherwise it would simply be merchandise 
like other kinds of merchandise. 

That objection to religion is as valid as 
though one might suggest that the only draw¬ 
back about flying is that it takes you off the 
ground, or that the trouble with ocean sailing 
is that you get away from the land. So with 
the objection to faith that you cannot prove it. 
Faith brings to each man the glorious neces¬ 
sity of being his own Columbus across an un¬ 
charted deep with no guide but the pilot stars. 

A. G. Gardiner says that ^^the Canadian 
Pacific Railroad was a plunge through noth¬ 
ing to nothing. It was a stupendous guess at 
the future.^^ It was no wonder that Sir Wil¬ 
liam Van Horn confesses that he had great 
sport building it! 

Faith in a loving God and his on-going pur¬ 
poses has the glory of a stupendous affirma¬ 
tion joined with an unceasing effort. The 


SKYLINES 


33 


man of faith may be sailing with sealed 
orders, but he is sailing along the skyline. 

To-day in particular the voyage of the 
church seems to be a voyage on alien seas. To 
large numbers of people, old, dear, familiar 
landmarks are gone. The horizon has been 
pushed back. The comfortable optimisms of 
prewar days have been submerged, like the 
lost continent of Atlantis. We are in the grip 
of new currents not marked on old theological 
maps. It is small wonder that many timid 
mariners are frightened and wish to put back 
into the snug little harbor of other days. The 
scene pictured in Joaquin Miller^s noble poem 
“Columbus’’^ is enacted again and again: 

“What shall I say, hrave Admiral, say. 

If we sight naught but seas at dawn?” 

“Why, you shall say at break of day. 

Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!” 

For over the skyline is the age of gold. 
^^Now faith is a well-grounded assurance of 
that which we hope for and a conviction of 
the reality of things which we do not see.” 

UJsed by permission of Harr Wagner Publishing Company, San Fran¬ 
cisco, California. 



Ill 


KULES FOR GIVING A PARTY 

^^When thou makest a feasf’ 

ND by all means make one. It is a great 



mistake not to have some red ink on the 
calendar. One of the parables of Jesus tells 
us that it is a huge blunder not to have a party 
dress. The man without a wedding garment 
was found guilty of a major sin. Calico and 
blue denim suffice for most of our forages into 
a work-a-day world, but there ought to be 
something hanging in the wardrobe of the 
mind with spangles on, with here and there a 
festoon, which can be whisked down and 
jumped into. No matter what our age, we are 
all debutantes in society (small “s’’), and a de¬ 
cent etiquette of living demands a good many 
coming-out parties when we emerge from 
hibernation and solitary confinement. 

An indispensable equipment for taking our 
places in society is a demeanor of heart and 
mind which can break into any routine and 
proclaim with authority: “Oyez! Oyez! The 


34 


KULES FOR A PARTY 


35 


High Court of Human Nature is now in ses¬ 
sion. Hats off! A Class A Event is now tak¬ 
ing place.” That is the essence of a real party. 

It is astonishing—to some people it must 
be scandalous—how many parties we find in 
the Gospels. The parables of Jesus seem at 
times to read like the society columns of a 
daily newspaper. The lilt of the orchestra 
and the rattle of dishes breaks in again and 
again through Jesus^ discourse. The Man of 
Sorrows, acquainted with grief, saw large 
place in life for festivals. The Gospels in that 
respect are in harmony with the lavish beauty 
and music provided in the entertainments of 
nature. Every evening when the sun sinks 
fair, pink-tinted clouds spell out an embossed 
invitation across the sky, 

Almighty God 
At Home 

Six-thirty to Eight 
Everyone Invited 

It is perfectly conceivable that, the sun could 
set and rise in strict businesslike fashion 
without all the unnecessary frills of a sunset. 
A gorgeous sunset must distress the soul of an 


36 


SKYLINES 


efficiency expert! So much of it is unneces¬ 
sary to the business on hand. He might well 
gasp out the angered protest of the first effi¬ 
ciency expert, Judas Iscariot: ^^To what pur¬ 
pose is this waste?” 

Jesus is the great Master of Human Revels. 
It is not without significance that Christian¬ 
ity’s distinctive occasion is a Child’s birthday 
party. 

From the speech and action of Jesus we can 
gather some practical rules for giving a party; 
rules which have not so much to do with ac¬ 
tual physical banquets and receptions as with 
those deeper attitudes and habits of mind, 
which transform gray and dead days into rose 
festivals. Although, for that matter, for an 
actual book of social etiquette in the literal 
sense of the word, nothing has ever been writ¬ 
ten which approaches the New Testament. 

The first divine rule for giving a party is to 
give a real one. Here is the prescription: 
^^When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the 
maimed, the halt, the blind.” The truly regal 
feast, the only real party that counts, is when 
we serve not a bit of cake and ice cream, but a 
bit of onrselves. And Jesus’ rule for such 
major social functions is to throw open the 


KULES FOE A PARTY 


37 


doors of our personality in its most radiant 
clothes to all who pass the threshold:,to the 

4 ' 

whole human family on parade; to the rear 
guard of the poor, the maimed and the halt 
as well as the first division of the Sons and 
Daughters of the American Revolution or the 
glittering company commanded by Captains 
Dun and Bradstreet. If you really want to 
give a party and share yourself, call the halt. 
What a troop they are—stumblers who never 
quite get there, who do not grace a drawing 
room! Call the maimed, those with some fatal 
fiaw or twist given by heredity or environ¬ 
ment. Call the whole Noah’s ark! 

Some people never give parties of that sort. 
They never admit to the warm room of their 
inner selves, with its lighted candles of sym¬ 
pathy, those who do not bring credentials 
from the local equivalent of ^^Burke’s Peer¬ 
age,” or who cannot turn the lock with a Phi 
Beta Kappa key. Their entertainments are 
all on this order: 

*‘I had a little tea party 

This aftemooon at three. 

’Twas very small— 

Three guests in all— 

Just If Myself and Me, 



38 


SKYLINES 


Myself ate up the sandwiches, 
While I drank up the tea. 
'Twas also I who ate the pie 
And passed the cake to Me.'* 


The neighbors get as much of a repast as did 
Mother Hubbard’s dog. Jesus’ rule bids us 
take down the barbed-wire entanglements 
which we have wound around the inner fort¬ 
ress of our personality, and build an open 
road. Novalis once said that every English¬ 
man is an island. Uncomplimentary remarks 
made about Englishmen by Germans have not 
been very popular in recent years. Neverthe¬ 
less, Novalis’ observation is substantially true 
of a large portion of the people of every na¬ 
tion. What islands we are! Waves of con¬ 
versation flow between us; sometimes a tidal 
wave of emotion overflows us and seems to 
join us; but only temporarily. The waves re¬ 
cede and we become islands again. 

Some human islands resemble Iceland. The 
breaking waves dash high on a stern and rock- 
bound coast. A polar expedition is needed to 
get in touch with them. They afford no land¬ 
ing place for ‘flame ducks.” Others are more 
like Bermuda, with a strong gulf stream of 
genial sympathy pushing you in their direc- 


KULES FOK A PARTY 


39 


tion. Between us and some people there is a 
barrier like the English Channel, and it is 
pretty rough sailing trying to get across. We 
are just about to make a landing and really 
discover them when a great cold wave strikes 
us and pushes us back again. 

Sometimes the barbed-wire entanglement 
which holds the human race at bay is a corpse¬ 
like manner. A. G. Gardiner said of Lord 
Kitchener that he had all the qualities of a 
poker except its occasional warmth. He en¬ 
tered a room like the Day of Judgment, stern 
and forbidding. Julia Ward Howe once wrote 
down in her diary, that she had attended a 
party where ‘^everyone seemed to have left 
themselves at home’’—a very fair description 
of many a dismal social function. Sometimes 
we do not admit any of the human family into 
our intimacy because we are utterly devoid 
of that genial and priceless small talk which 
makes the world spin easily. One of the finest 
tributes ever paid to Charles Dickens was that 
^^he circulated as easily as small change.” 
Other folks, on the contrary, alas! are like a 
twenty-dollar bill—valuable, but inconvenient 
to get into circulation. 

Joyce Kilmer has put into his “Ballad of 


40 


SKYLINES 


Gates and Doors” a beautiful phrasing of 
this Rule One of Jesus: 

“Unbar your heart this evening 
And keep no stranger out, 

Take from your soul’s great portal 
The barrier of doubt. 

To humble folks and weary 
Give hearty welcoming. 

Your breast shall be to-morrow 
The cradle of a King.”i 

Another has carried the thought of Jesus a 
little farther into its larger meaning: 

“And if I share my crust, 

As common manhood must, 

With one whose need is greater than my own. 

Shall I not also give 
His soul, that it may live. 

Of the abundant pleasures I have known? 

“And so, if I have wrought— 

Amassed or conceived aught 
Of beauty, or intelligence or power 
It is not mine to hoard 
It stands there to afford 
Its generous service simply as a flower.” 

Rule Two is to spread your intellectual 
feast, however frugal or full it may he, where 
the folks on the street can reach it. When you 


‘Keprinted by permission of George H. Doran Company. 



RULES FOR A PARTY 


41 


are to share some thought, some insight, some 
conviction, put it into such simple and demo¬ 
cratic form that even the very maimed and 
halt intellectually can take it. I believe this 
would be Jesus’ first great principle of homi¬ 
letics—^‘When thou makest a feast of the 
good things of the gospel, call the maimed and 
the halt, call the poor and the blind and serve 
them.” The lame have a hard time playing at 
^^hare and hounds”—trying to follow a fleet 
and nimble theologian as he bounds from 
major to minor premise! Those words—the 
poor, the maimed, the halt and the blind— 
are a rather accurate description of the aver¬ 
age congregation. Woe be to him who for¬ 
gets it! Our pretentious pulpit utterances 
are challenges to the congregation of the halt 
to compete in the high hurdles or the pole 
vault or the two-mile run. We beseech you, 
brethren, by the mercies of God, to remember 
the halt! Remember the feast that Jesus 
spread, so easily reached, so quickly under¬ 
stood that he won the only final verdict of suc¬ 
cess worth striving for—the common people 
heard him gladly. 

A lady once said to the young Moncure D. 
Conway, ^‘Brother, you seem to be preaching 


42 


SKYLINES 


to the moon!” But sometimes it is even far¬ 
ther precincts than the moon that are aimed 
at in sermons which are as applicable and 
helpful to the rings of Saturn as they are to 
the folks in the back pew. 

Martin Luther once said, with that sublime 
common sense which was his greatest gift: 
‘^When I preach I regard neither doctors nor 
magistrates, of whom I have above forty in 
the congregation; I have all my eyes on the 
servant maids and on the children. And if 
the learned men are not well pleased with what 
they hear, well, the door is open.” A sermon 
which the King delighteth to honor is not so 
much like an annual address to the Phi Beta 
Kappa society as it is like a block party to 
which everyone is invited, and which everyone 
can share. So Rule Number Two practically 
amounts to this: When thou makest a speech, 
give a block party. 

Rule Number Three is to help to get the 
world ready for the big party yet to come. 
For the world is going to give a party to the 
lame, halt, the blind, and the poor, when they 
shall receive their great invitation to share in 
the joys and privileges and the rewards of life. 
Jesus’ parable of the Great Feast has a bit 


KULES FOR A PARTY 


43 


of profound philosophy of history in it. The 
banquet of life has so far been shared by a 
very few who have kept all the invitations for 
themselves. The world has been conducted on 
the lines of a select country club. But, in the 
providence of God, we are approaching that 
time when, as in the parable, all barriers were 
broken down and an invitation was broad¬ 
casted to all the lanes and alleys around. The 
irresistible on-moving of the Christian social 
conscience, with its growing sense of the in¬ 
justice and the inhumanities of the present 
social order, is the beginning of that great 
invitation. We are getting some old debris 
cleared out of the public square where the 
Maypole is to be wound. 

The world’s present house party is at the 
best a bungled social function. There is 
enough room in the house and plenty to eat, 
but the management is poor, insufferably stu¬ 
pid. Look over the facts, even in the United 
States, the richest land in the world. 

Here in New York city alone are some 270,- 
000 darkened tenement rooms that never see 
the light of God’s sun: one person in twelve 
is buried penniless in the ^^Potter’s Field”; 
one in fourteen evicted, because they cannot 


44 


SKYLINES 


pay their rent; from twelve to twenty per cent 
of the children are undernourished; thousands 
are living in stifling slums, in wretched tene¬ 
ments, ill-fed, with high infant mortality, un¬ 
der conditions that crush out the life of body, 
mind, and spirit. 

According to the Final Report of the In¬ 
dustrial Relations Commission, 39 per cent 
of the mothers in industry are forced to work. 
Two thirds of the women in the factories up 
to the outbreak of the Great War were receiv¬ 
ing $8 a week or less, and one half of them |6 
a week or less. Over 20,000 persons are killed 
in industry each year. Of the 700,000 acci¬ 
dents yearly at least half are preventable. In 
the great basic industries over 2,000,000 are 
unemployed. Wage-earners lose more than 
one flfth of their time in unemployment. Ten 
million live in poverty in normal times in 
America. Ten million now living will die pre¬ 
maturely of preventable diseases at the pres¬ 
ent death rate in this country. The poor are 
dying at three times the death rate of the well- 
to-do, and from tuberculosis, at seven times 
their death rate. From 12 per cent to 20 per 
cent of the children in the great cities are un¬ 
derfed. These conditions inevitably produce 


RULES FOR A PARTY 


45 


the crushed or distorted bodies and minds 
from which the army of crime is recruited.^ 

This is a mighty poor social housekeeping! 
And the task of the century is the planning 
and carrying out of such changes in the rules 
as shall make human life what it is in Jesus^ 
vision, a great democratic feast of God. 

But the great feast of the Kingdom can 
never be stated in merely negative terms. 
Merely to remove the privations of life or to 
distribute its unequal burdens will never 
make the kingdom of God. The fallacy that 
happiness has its source in abundance of 
things is one of the oldest and deadliest falla¬ 
cies in the world. It is the unanswerable ob¬ 
jection to the confident dogmatisms of mate¬ 
rialistic socialism. The socialistic Utopia of 
the mechanical and materialistic theorist 
would seem to be located just as near to hell 
as it is to heaven, for a man can be bored to 
death as well as be starved to death; and be¬ 
ing bored to death is wrought with more dan¬ 
ger to his soul than the unpleasant process of 
starvation. Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
voiced keen objection to the mechanical pro¬ 
jects of a French socialist when she said in 


^Sherwood Eddy, American Problems, 



46 


SKYLINES 


^^Aurora Leigh’’ that ‘^they are not poets 
enough to learn that life develops from 
within.” 

The great democratic feast to which Jesus 
flung out the invitation which we are only be¬ 
ginning to heed is more than a dinner pail; it 
is more than a living w^age. No wage can be 
a living wage unless it is paid in dreams as 
well as dollars. 

Just because it is a ^^real party” The Great 
Feast is an order of life in which freedom and 
elbow room will be given to every expanding 
faculty of the individual soul. It is a kind 
of national and international housekeeping 
where every member of the family shall be re¬ 
garded with reverence for his personality and 
where he shall have his mutual obligations 
and privileges in the home. 

Jane Addams once said that some day we 
will be ashamed of the arguments by which 
we have pleaded even for so good a thing as 
abolition of child labor. She says that some 
day we will be ashamed to talk of the right 
of the child to health or the right of the child 
to schooling. We shall, rather, face the funda¬ 
mental issues and talk about the right of the 
child to happiness. Jesus recognized that as 


RULES FOR A PARTY 


47 


the chief issue. The Christian social task is 
not merely to provide enough to eat and to 
wear for the billions of the human family, but 
it is to bring that family together into a spirit¬ 
ual fellowship. What the Kingdom does is 
to give us all a vision of life as a whole, as a 
city of God, a beloved community, a vision of 
men and women living together in the Spirit 
and doing together the great works of the 
Spirit. 


IV 


TRAINS OF THOUGHT 
HE principal trouble with a single-track 



mind is that there are so many head-on 
collisions. Now, collisions add to the thrills 
and tremors of life and are to be recommended 
for the stimulation of sluggish brains. Often 
when two antagonistic ideas, each moving at 
the rate of eight miles an hour, collide in a 
one-track mind, it is like the famous meeting 
of an irresistible force with an immovable 
body. Something may happen! But head-on 
collisions clutter up the road for traffic; and 
on the whole, considerably more business is 
done over the tracks when some way of pass¬ 
ing an idea going in the other direction can be 
v/orked out. 

Which brings me to my Aunt Caroline. I 
can never forget the fascinated interest with 
which we would watch an idea coming along 
on the track of her conversation, and could 
see down the road a bit, just around the bend, 
another idea headed straight for her. It was 
like the fascination of watching a railroad 


48 


TRAINS OF THOUGHT 


49 


wreck in the ^^movies.” ‘^They are going to 
hit!’’ we would exclaim, holding on to our 
chairs—and they did hit. Aunt Caroline was 
shocked by something new nearly every day. 

Such an existence is hard on the “rolling 
stock.” We used to try to persuade her to 
lay another track on which there could go 
without any catastrophe all sorts of ideas for 
which she had little use. But we never suc¬ 
ceeded. 

In a one-track mind anything going the 
other way always means a collision. 

Of course it has its advantages. With a 
single-track mind life becomes very simple. 
It is easier on the upkeep and the overhead. 
But by its very reduction of the complex busi¬ 
ness of life and thinking into a few meager 
formulas, it takes away the real sport of men¬ 
tal railroading. There is no friendly waving 
of the hand in the course of the day’s trip, 
speeding a greeting to a dinky little train of 
thought going in the other direction loaded 
with some queer-looking passengers. There 
is no zest of two ideas pulling along side by 
side or the sport of watching to see which 
one “gets the jump” on the other. 

The doctrinaire and the fanatic both in poli- 


50 


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tics and religion cannot tolerate a second 
track. They abhor the whiz of a divergent 
idea rushing by. Far better for them the bar¬ 
ren simplicity of a logical consistency, or a 
narrowness which shuts out nine tenths of the 
landscape. With them life becomes either a 
series of futile collisions or a monomania. 

Herbert Spencer, of course, is the illustra¬ 
tion most frequently exhibited as the horrible 
example. Doubtless he has been grievously 
slandered by people eager to point a moral. 
But the famous remark of Huxley^s that 
‘‘SpenceFs idea of a tragedy is a deduction 
killed by a fact^^ is a full-length portrait of a 
one-track mind. 

Mrs. Barnett, in her recent life of her hus¬ 
band, Canon Barnett, gives another beauti¬ 
ful example of the severe cast of Spencer’s 
mind. Mr. Spencer had accompanied the Bar¬ 
netts to Egypt. They were looking at the Nile. 
Mrs. Barnett says: hundred thoughts and 

pictures of the lives, joys, pains of the multi¬ 
tude who had lived by it, on it, for it, chased 
each other through our minds. We stood si¬ 
lenced by its historical beauty, until Mr. Spen¬ 
cer broke the silence with, ‘The color of the 
water hardly vouches for its hygienic prop- 


TRAINS OF THOUGHT 


51 


erties.’ To such heights of imagination and 
emotion could a one-track scientist rise I Cato, 
the champion bore of history, with his one con¬ 
clusion to every speech, ^^Ca/rthago delenda 
est/’ has left a large progeny. 

All this is not merely a futile phantasy. The 
most deadly animal at large in the world to¬ 
day is the man with the one-track mind, the 
^^bitter-ender” of every sort. Both the reli¬ 
gious ‘‘bitter-ender,” the fundamentalist, “red 
in tooth and claw,” seeking whom he may de¬ 
vour, and the irreconcilable wind-bag in the 
Senate, block the varied intricate traffic inter¬ 
lacing in all directions by which the City of 
God must be built. 

“Trains of thought” is/a very suggestive 
phrase if we but turn it around in the sun¬ 
light a few times. One observation which 
flashes in on us is that in the minds of a great 
many people all the trains of thought are 
freight trains. Over the convolutions of their 
brain they pull drygoods and pig iron. The 
passenger business is nil. Their epitaph could 
be written in the words, 

“Who, born for the universe, narrowed their mind. 
And to business gave up what was meant for man¬ 
kind.” 


52 


SKYLINES 


Sometimes the trains of thought they carry 
in their minds are very long ones, with incred¬ 
ible Mogul engines of goodness knows how 
many horse power pulling them. 

Their conversation is like the heavy wheez¬ 
ing of a freight train making a 45 per cent 
grade. “Yours received and contents noted’’ 
—“As per invoice”—“Option for forty days” 
—“Ten per cent discount”—“Market closed at 
87.” Not a very heavy traffic in ideas or 
ideals or sympathies there! 

In pathological cases of business mania 
these trains run all night. 

“Did you try the simple plan of counting 
sheep for your insomnia?” 

“Yes, Doctor,” said the general manager, 
“but I made a mess of it. I counted ten thou¬ 
sand sheep. Put ’em on the cars and shipped 
them to market, and when I got through 
counting the wad of money I got for them at 
present prices, it was time to wake up.” 

The exclusive business mind is a landscape 
whose noble vista is composed of desks and 
typewriters, filing cases and insurance calen¬ 
dars, and the bald heads of men who believe 
dreams to be idiotic. It is a world whose 
crises you cannot comprehend unless you have 


TKAINS OF THOUGHT 


53 


learned that the difference between a 2-A pen¬ 
cil and a 2-B pencil is at least as great as the 
contrast between Singapore and Kansas City. 

It is an aggravated case of peonage when so 
delicate and intricate a mechanism as the hu¬ 
man mind has the whole track monopolized by 
invoices; when aspiration, emotion, phantasy, 
dreams—in a word, when the ^^soul limited’’ 
has no place on the schedule. 

Before me is the publisher’s blurb of a book 
which is.described as ^^the most inspiring book 
published in twenty-five years.” It is called 
‘^The Men Who Are Making America.” Being 
slightly interested in America, I sit up and 
take notice. I learn that fifty giants are 
making America. I cannot call all the roll of 
fame, but among the major prophets are Gug¬ 
genheim, Gary, Duke, Stillman, DuPont, and 
most appropriately. Dollar. The minor 
prophets, nameless here, are like unto them. 
I ask, ^^Is it true that these men are making 
America?” Then God pity us! The great 
question is, ^^What are they making America?” 
Are they making it anything more than a 
cluttering, shrieking switching yard? 

A commentary on this freight business is an 
article by the Japanese ambassador, Baron 


54 


SKYLINES 


Sato, in a recent magazine on ‘^The New Poets 
of Japan.^’ I picked it up with my mind all 
ready for a whiff of cherry blossoms and my 
eyes expecting a glimpse of Fujiyama’s sum¬ 
mit through the haze. Instead I learned that 
the new poets of Japan are ^^those who are 
writing the nation’s epics in steel and iron 
and textiles”! Very pretty play on words. 
But please find some other word than ^^poet.” 
Poets (hobo poets excepted) do not ride on 
freight trains! 

^^What do you think of New York?” someone 
asked a recent visitor. ^^I only got a worm’s- 
eye view of it,” was the answer. If all our 
trains of thought run in the subways of com¬ 
mercialism, our views of the universe will be 
just about as adequate. The mind, like the 
Sabbath, was made for man. It was designed 
for great world-girding commerce in ideas, 
sympathies and those genial currents of the 
soul which cannot be added up in ledgers. 

One of the major arts in operating trains of 
thought is to keep them on the Main Line. 
An open switch is a sin that doth so easily 
beset us. Before we know it we have left the 
trunk line which goes through to the destina¬ 
tion we started for and which is worth arriv- 


TKAINS OF THOUGHT 


55 


ing at, and we are off, rolling down a little 
spur that leads nowhere. 

Straight thinking is a hard undertaking. In 
mental operations the zigzag or the curve is 
the line of least resistance. 

Thomas Carlyle has left a lifelike picture of 
the hard work of thinking in a line: ^^When 
I sit down to write, there is not an idea dis¬ 
cernible in the heart of me . . . just one 
dull cloud of stupidity. It is only with an 
effort like swimming for life that I get begun 
to think at all.” Does this not sound like the 
confession of a locomotive engineer who has 
stopped his engine on dead center, and is mak¬ 
ing frantic effort to get a start? Once started 
it takes just as hard an effort to keep on the 
main line. 

We realize this when we hear people talk¬ 
ing. Shakespeare makes one of his characters 
say, am a plain, blunt man, and speak 
straight on.” Our experience of plain, blunt 
men is that they do everything except speak 
right on; they ramble to all points of the com¬ 
pass. The shortest distance between two 
points is a straight line, and few there be that 
find it. Almost before we know it, the talker 
has left the main line and is tearing across the 


56 


SKYLINES 


meadows on a little spur. Even the simplest 
conversations are frequently like starting on 
a trip from Springfield to Boston. Simple 
enough, as one looks at it, but the journey is 
made by way of Charleston, South Carolina, 
finally arriving at Sault Sainte Marie. 

This major art of keeping trains of thought 
on the main line is just as important and ex¬ 
acting in the larger aspects of thinking and 
acting. It is the simple, the universal, the 
essential things which count. 

William Butler Yates has defined genius as 
the art of living with the major issues of life. 
The men who have touched deeply their fel- 
lowmen have kept to the main line of the 
primitive and simple things. Our greatest 
paintings are paintings of such things as a 
man plowing a field, of sowing or reaping; a 
girl filling a pitcher from a spring; a young 
mother with her child; a fisherman mending 
his nets; a light from a lonely hut on a dark 
night. 

Max Beerbohn, in And Even Now, has put 
in rollicking words of keen satire this truth, 
well worthy of the remembrance of every min¬ 
ister and leader: ^^And thus it is that Brown’s 
Ode to the Steam Plough, Jones’ Sonnet Se- 


TRAINS OF THOUGHT 


57 


quence on the Automatic Reaping Machine, 
and Robinson’s Epic of the Piscicidal 
Dynamo, leave unstirred the deeper depths of 
emotion in us. The subjects chosen by these 
three great poets do not much impress us when 
we regard them suh specie ceternitatis. Smith 
has painted nothing more masterly than his 
picture of a girl turning a hot-water tap. But 
has he never seen a girl fill a pitcher from a 
spring? Smither’s picture of a young mother 
seconding a resolution at a meeting of a Board 
of Guardians is magnificent, as brushwork. 
But why not have cut out the Board and put 
in the baby? I yield to no one in admiration 
of Smithkin’s ^Fagade of the Waldorf Hotel 
by Night, in Peace Time.’ But a single light 
from a lonely hut would have been a finer 
theme.” 

Perhaps it is to the minister most of all that 
this art of keeping trains of thought on the 
main line is to be commended. 

What an appalling number of sermons there 
are, have been, and perhaps ever will be, which 
are like Madame Patti’s home in Wales, in a 
wild territory of Brecknockshire. She always 
said in giving its location, that ^fit was twenty- 
three miles from everywhere and very beauti- 


58 


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ful.’’ The description would fit perfectly a 
large number of sermons—twenty-three miles 
from everywhere instead of being about three 
feet from somewhere! 

Again and again we come back to the truth 
that the discourses of Jesus move across the 
tract of human life on great trunk lines. The 
words of his tongue are the simple one-syllable 
words for simple things—God, sin, light, love, 
child. The preaching which arrests and holds 
men is that which follows the main line of the 
great themes of apostolic size. 

When a man departs from the major tones 
of the gospel he becomes a sounding brass and 
linking cymbal no matter how ingeniously 
he may drum. 

Bishop Charles H. Brent has said very 
earnestly, ^^We preachers are not simple 
enough even for adults, let alone children. We 
float into high philosophies which, however 
clear they may be to our minds, do not strike 
home in the lives of our hearers. We enter 
into fine disputation on sacraments, church 
government, and side issues of religion, when 
the majority of the congi^egation are strug¬ 
gling to reach some clear belief in a personal 
God, or an understanding of the incarnation 


TRAINS OP THOUGHT 


59 


which will help them to combat temptation, or 
a knowledge of penitence that will rid them of 
the unbearable, sickening weight of their 
sins.” 

How readily many preachers allow their 
pulpits to be usurped! The Sunday-serrice an¬ 
nouncements of a certain church recently 
show the pulpit occupied successively by a 
vaudeville brass band and some movie ac¬ 
tress. One wonders when there is such an 
eagerness to surrender the pulpit to any Tom, 
Dick, and Harry who can collect a crowd, 
whether the church itself has any burning 
message whose delivery is a life-and-death mat¬ 
ter. Our feeling in such a case is that it would 
be wise to throw the throttle into reverse and 
back to the main line. Such little by-trails 
do not lead anywhere. 

It is a dull and drab mind and heart when 
all the trains of thought are local trains, 
making all the stops in regular order, and 
never crashing along at very much speed. 
Many people are never carried out of them¬ 
selves by an emotion or an enthusiasm which 
whirls them out of the petty details of their 
local environment. 

Now, I would not have local trains ex- 


60 


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eluded. I yield to no man or—though it is a 
great thing to say—to no woman in my taste 
for gossip. I know of nothing which so lightr 
ens the gloom as a fresh piece of interesting 
gossip. I can well sympathize Tvdth Robert 
Louis Stevenson writing from his exile: ^^For 
heaven’s sake tell me the news. Send me a 
letter crammed full of gossip.” A feeling for 
the smallest details of life is a fine boon. 

But once in a while mind and heart ought 
to be whirled about on the ^^Through Express” 
bound for infinity. There is no ecstasy in life 
to be compared with the ^^fifty-mile-an-hour” 
feeling that comes over the spirit as we become 
part of a great purpose outside of ourselves, 
and our spirits thrill to great spiritual reali¬ 
ties. These things are more than meat and 
drink, and they have nothing to do with what 
the neighbors wear or how much they make a 
month. 

Some people who never get away from the 
local stops run a mental ^^five-and-ten-cent” 
store. On the smooth surface of their un¬ 
ruffled brow you can read as plainly as though 
it were written in red letters, ^^Nothing in this 
place worth over ten cents.” 

Our fathers very often lived in a smaller 


TRAINS OF THOUGHT 


61 


world geographically than we do, but their 
trains of thought were “through trains.” 
Great thoughts made their home with them; 
thoughts whose extent was endless. It was 
from a “through train” that they sang, 

“I’m a pilgrim, and I’m a stranger, 

I can tarry, I can tarry but a night.” 


V 




SEVEN YEARS’ BAD LUCK 

S uperstitions are much easier to un¬ 
derstand than common sense. Having no 
desire to join the standing army of manufac¬ 
turers of imitation Chesterton paradoxes, I 
leave that obvious truth in plain sight, without 
tossing it up in the air and catching it. Mr. 
Chesterton could juggle it on the point of a 
fountain pen for at least four pages, dexter¬ 
ously revolving it to show you all sides with¬ 
out ever once letting it touch the ground. Per¬ 
haps he has done so somewhere, though he usu¬ 
ally picks out more difficult stunts. The above 
statement about superstition would be easy 
even for the merest tyro in paradox juggling. 
For instance, take the superstition that it is 
bad luck to pass under a ladder. Elementary, 
my dear Watson! For this superstition is the 
cumulative experience of generations of un¬ 
lucky wights who have been baptized with 
cans of paint dropped from ladders or had 

62 


SEVEN YEARS^ BAD LUCK 63 


their heads bumped with hammers. So after 
several centuries, the superstition that it was 
bad luck to pass under a ladder arose for the 
preservation of the craniums of babes and 
sucklings. 

Another moss-covered superstition tells us 
that it is bad luck to come back after we have 
just started out of the house. We are told that 
people who did that would have bad luck. I 
should hope so! Why on earth shouldn’t they? 
Their actions show them to be scatter-brained; 
they go off half-cocked and consequently they 

are bound to have bad luck. The fact that thev 

«/ 

actually had bad luck was a scientific observa¬ 
tion. But ascribing it to their going back after 
they had once started on their journey to pick 
up something they had forgotten was an un¬ 
scientific assignment of the cause—after all, 
a minor matter. 

After this introductory overture, let us 
boldly approach the order of the day—the 
truth that it brings seven years’ bad luck to 
break a mirror. Seven years? That is getting 
off easy! A conservative estimate would be 
seventy-seven years. The people who break 
mirrors are under the evil enchantment of 
awkwardness, of which evil charm breaking a 



64 


SKYLINES 


mirror is only a symptom. And for them life 
will be enlivened by many a startling crash. 
The superstition has at least that rational 
basis. 

But enshrined in it is a much deeper truth, 
having to do with a malady more deadly than 
awkwardness—for awkwardness is not always 
fatal. Even grotesquely a^vkward humans 
may sometimes survive and be fairly happy. I 
know, for up to the present date I have sur¬ 
vived myself. The deeper truth of the com¬ 
mon superstition is that it is a terrible thing 
to break a mirror in which you can see your¬ 
self as you actually are. It is an unmixed 
calamity with seven years’ bad luck and multi¬ 
ples thereof in its train, to lose the priceless 
faculty of detaching yourself from yourself, 
and looking on the spectacle from the grand¬ 
stand. 

Robert Burns prayed the Great Giver for 
the power to see ourselves as others see us. 
But he was praying for gifts already pro¬ 
vided. We are endowed with a great variety 
of mirrors, which, when rightly used, give us 
an accurate report of ourselves. But we break 
them and then do penal servitude for our 
crime. 


SEVEN YEARS’ BAD LUCK 65 


There is no question about the bad luck. 
VTien we lose the ability to see ourselves in 
our true proportions, when we surround our¬ 
selves with lying illusions instead of looking 
realities continually in the face, we are due 
for some bad spills and disastrous jolts. 
^Tride goeth before a fall”—and when we 
have only pride in which to see our reflection, 
we have nothing to save us from taking a 
header over one precipice after another. 

Without an honest looking-glass to show 
us our right height the world is out of pro¬ 
portion. Our grotesquely false self-estimates 
will condemn us to seven years of loneliness— 
the worst sort of bad luck—for untamed con¬ 
ceit separateth chief friends. 

When we break a mirror we are in the evil 
case of the Lady of Shalott, who knew when 
her mirror cracked that something desperate 
had happened: 

“The curse has come upon me,” 

Cried the Lady of Shalott. 

It is enormously hard to form a just esti¬ 
mate of ourselves. For that reason we need 
every aid to the process which nature has pro¬ 
vided. The apostle James well pictures the 


66 


SKYLINES 


difficulty when he says that ‘^a man beholdeth 
himself in a mirror and goeth away and 
straightway forgeteth what manner of man 
he was.’^ Dr. Kufus M. Jones says that these 
words of the apostle James are a great piece 
of physchological insight, as fresh and mod¬ 
ern as though it were written by his own un- 
apostolic namesake Professor William James. 
It is a notorious fact that none of us can visu¬ 
alize our own faces from memory. We see our¬ 
selves often enough, but the image fades out 
at once and leaves only a vague blur. One of 
the mercies of heaven, no doubt! 

Mr. Chesterton has imagined a very pene¬ 
trating fancy about a fastidious architect and 
a badly designed house. The sensitive artist 
lived in the unsightly house because it was the 
only place in town from which he could be 
sure of never seeing it. He had a faint fear 
that he might catch some far-off glimpse of 
the house in any other neighborhood. His 
morbid apprehension suggested he might be 
lured to take a stroll and by some dreadful 
accident turn in the direction of the awful 
house. The only safe way was to live in it 
himself! Now that is just what we all do. We 
see every other house except the one we live 


SEVEN YEARS^ BAB LUCK 67 


in. We can check off glibly one hundred and 
nineteen failings of our neighbors both right 
and left. We can point out with great detail 
that their minds were designed in the early 
Ming period of architecture. But, like the 
artist who lived in the terrible house, we never 
see ourselves. 

Dostoevsky pleads with us that every day 
and every hour we walk around ourselves and 
examine ourselves, but that implies getting 
loose from ourselves, which is an arduous and 
delicate undertaking. 

Strickland Gillilan outlines the process in 
his poem: 

“Just stand aside and watch yourself go by; 

Think of yourself as ‘he’ instead of ‘I.* 

Note closely as in other men you note 
The bad-kneed trousers and the seedy coat. 

Pick flaws; find fault, forget the man is you, 

And try to make your estimate ring true. 

Confront yourself and look you in the eye, 

Just stand aside and watch yourself go by.’’^ 

There are two priceless mirrors for the soul 
which should never be broken. They are 
humility and the sense of humor. These two 
are twins, or at least they are closely related, 
children of the same parents. They are truth- 


1 Used by permisBion of Forbes & Company. 



68 


SKYLINES 


telling, polished mirrors in which we can take 
a darting glance and be enabled by their re¬ 
port to keep within the facts in our estimate 
of ourselves. If we keep them whole, they 
will save us more than seven years of bumped 
heads and barked shins. 

No essay is really scientific in these days 
without some reference to complexes, so let 
us describe what these two magic mirrors will 
do for us in the approved “complex’^ form. 

One of the most popular complexes which 
attack human beings is the Gulliver complex 
—the idea that they are Gullivers in a land of 
Lilliputians. We can all recall the fascinating 
picture of Gulliver stooping down from his 
infinite height and looking at the strange 
little race of men about his feet. That is the 
view which many people continually have of 
themselves. Their trips back and forth 
through the day are a series of Gulliver’s 
travels. When we get so afflicted both our 
sense of humor and our sense of humility free 
us from the evil spell complex. They tell us; 
^‘This is not really Lilliput, old man. This is 
the United States, and you owe the butcher 
ten dollars. You are mighty lucky to be out 
of jail.” 


SEVEN YEARS’ BAD LUCK 69 


Another popular complex is the Orpheus 
complex, the delirium that one’s words of wis¬ 
dom and the cadence of one’s voice have power 
to charm all humans—and some rocks. One 
with that complex imagines that he is Orpheus, 
the music of whose voice threw even inanimate 
things into a spell. 

We have all listened to the Rev. Dr. Orpheus 
on many occasions when he was having a per¬ 
fectly wonderful time all by himself up on the 
platform, and his mental picture of the audi¬ 
ence was that of the human race held immov¬ 
able in a charm. Orpheus, you remember, went 
to perdition, and so does everyone who gets 
the idea that his words are an irresistible en¬ 
chantment. 

A sense of humor is a means of grace. ^^Now 
abideth these three,” said an Irishman quot¬ 
ing Saint Paul, ‘^faith, hope and love. And 
the greatest of these is a sense of humor.” His 
exegesis was all right. Is your hat four sizes 
too large for you? Your sense of humor will 
tell you all about it, and prevent you from al¬ 
lowing your exaggerated self-importance to 
make you ridiculous. If you look at this mir¬ 
ror long enough, it will whisper to you in con¬ 
fidence that your ears look suspiciously like 


70 


SKYLINES 


those of a donkey, that you had better wear 
your hair long to cover them up. Without that 
hint from your sense of humor your unre¬ 
strained actions would soon add to the gaiety 
of nations. You would label yourself as a 
near relative of that comic figure who an¬ 
nounces, am Sir Oracle, and when I ope’ 
my lips, let no dog bark.” 

A genuine sense of humility is the beginning 
of all wisdom and the secret of all growth. It 
is also a preserver from painful and ridicu¬ 
lous escapades into which we are so easily 
lured by conceit. A sergeant-instructor said 
these words to a cadet and they are well 
worth reading at least once a week as part of 
our morning devotions: ^‘No, ye’ll no mak’ an 
officer. But it’s just possible if the warr keep 
on a while ye micht—micht, mind ye—^^begin 
to an’ ye prractice harrd—verra harrd—hae a 
glimmer that ye’ll never ken the r-rudiments 
o’ the wurrk.” 

In more serious words Emerson gave the 
same picture of the road to true worth when 
he said of his essays in Journal in 1840: ‘‘I 
have been writing witli some pains (^ssays on 
various matters Jis a sort of apology tu my 
country for my ai)parent idleness. But the 


SEVEN YEARS’ HAD LVCK 


71 


pwr work has UH>ktHl pooim* daily as I strove 
to end it," 

These mirroi*s can never be replaced, no 
substitute can ever Ik' found for them. Handle 
with care! 

A wife is an uncertain mirror. Sometimes 
a wife is a full-len^h pier glass for a man; 
not that pitiless kind of conjugal mirror that 
specializes on wrinkles and warts, nor one of 
those frank friends whose frankness is very 
much more evident than their friendship, but 
a true reflector which keeps a man in the paths 
of sanity. Many a minister, for instance, 
after his most eloquent flight around Olympus 
is let down to earth by a wise and loving wife 
as softly 

**As a feather is wafted downward 
From an eagle in its flight” 

without shattering the good man^s composure 
into a thousand pieces by too sudden a fall. It 
is a wonderful means of grace to a man with 
his hea/1 still in the clouds to have a loved 
voice say: ‘‘Forty minutr^s this evening, Wil¬ 
liam! You will have U> be a little careful 
alK>ut that.^^ It enables him to S(*e himself as 
he ought U>y when afUtr his soiil-stirriiig ser- 


72 


SKYLINES 


mon on peace, Ms wife says to Mm: wish 

you would not double up your fists so in your 
gestures. I think it scares the congregation.’^ 

Sometimes a wife is a freak-mirror, like one 
of those concave looking-glasses which shows 
a person twice his natural size. The man as 
thin as a rail can stand in front of it and as¬ 
sume the proportions of a baby elephant. It 
is a terrible misfortune for a man to see him¬ 
self enlarged unduly in the uncritical estimate 
of blind love. Better by far the most pitiless 
tale of truth told by a candid enemy than the 
weird refiections thrown back by blind adula¬ 
tion ! 

Great souls are a wonderful gallery of mir¬ 
rors. Not that they give us realistic views of 
ourselves, for they do not. But they help us 
see life in its true proportions. They walk 
before us, and our petty superiorities over our 
neighbor, which seemed of such momentous 
magnitude before, dwindle to the vanishing 
point. They change the Pharisee with his 
peacock strut and pious cant into the publi¬ 
can to whose lips only one prayer rises—^^God 
be merciful to me, a sinner!” It is tragically 
bad luck to break that miiTor, to put ourselves 
out of range of influence of great characters in 


SEVEN YEARS' BAD LUCK 73 


history and in the present day, for their clear 
reflection of life's true greatness helps us to 
rise out of lives of tawdry insignificance. 

Emerson presents us an ideal mirror to 
stand in front of when he says, ^^Measure your 
present habit of thought and action by the re¬ 
membrance of your dead, by the remembrance 
of three or four great men who are yet 
alive, by the image of your distant friend, by 
the lives and precepts of the heroes and phil¬ 
osophers. These all are only shadows of the 
primary sentiments at home in your soul." In 
such mirrors we can see ourselves in prophetic 
vision of what we ought to be and may be. 

Christ is the mirror of all men, the measure 
of the stature of men by which we may esti¬ 
mate ourselves. There is a very poignant 
story of an artist in a Middle Western town 
in the United States who achieved a great 
local vogue. His vivid and startling color ef¬ 
fects were highly praised. He had but little 
training, but what he lacked in technique he 
made up in assurance. He conceived the idea 
of going to France in order to fulfill his des¬ 
tiny as the great painter of his day. He went 
to the Louvre and looked at the pictures. At 
first the somber and quiet hues of some of the 


74 


SKYLINES 


great masters aroused in him a complacent 
disdain. However, as he staved on week after 
week, the real soul of the artist which was in 
him responded to the masterpieces. It was 
a terrible agony of soul that the man went 
through when he realized that if those 
paintings represent art, his own best work was 
nothing but crude daubing and that was the 
conclusion he came to when face to face with 
the best. 

It is exactly that which Jesus Christ does 
for the race. As we look upon his achieve¬ 
ment in the art of life, we see ourselves as the 
crudest of crude daubers. It is an immeas¬ 
urable tragedy that for many men and women 
Christ is only a Broken Mirror. They swell 
up their Lilliputian chests, never realizing 
what malformed and undersized specimens of 
humanity they are. Sometimes the mirror of 
Christ has been dashed to the ground in anger 
because of the truth it tells about us. Some¬ 
times it has been left slip out of clumsy hands. 
Sometimes the reflection of the Master has 
been allowed to become dim, covered with a 
film of dust through neglect and carelessness. 
It is an irreparable loss when the majestic 
figure of Jesus no longer walks before us. It 


SEVEN YEARS’ BAD LUCK 75 


means ‘‘bad luck” for all the years when we 
can no longer see life’s true proportions in the 
form of Him who saw life steadily and saw it 
whole. 


VI 


DEAD LANGUAGES 
HE question whether theological students 



should devote much time to the study of 
^^dead languages” used to be a rather com¬ 
bustible one. On the one hand we were as¬ 
sured hotly that there were no dead languages, 
that Hebrew and Greek studied under a real 
master were tremendously alive, tingling with 
vitality. In spite of that, however, ‘‘dead 
languages” as educational necessities have 
fallen on evil days with few so poor to do 
them reverence. Perhaps the most unkindest 
cut of all is the recent thrust of so eminent a 
Greek scholar as Principal James Denney, in 
one of his letters to Robertson Nicoll: “We 
could teach a great deal more that w^ould fit 
men to be ministers if Tve did not indulge the 
pretense of teaching through Greek and He¬ 
brew instead of teaching in the mother tongue. 
I think it no better than a superstition to be¬ 
lieve that every man who is to preach the gos- 


76 


DEAD LANGUAGES 


77 


pel and do pastoral work must affect to be a 
student of Greek; as for finding the word of 
God in Holy Scripture and presenting it for 
the edifying of the church, the men who can¬ 
not do that with the English Bible, which is 
all that the church itself has to depend upon, 
cannot do it at all.’’ 

The truth of the matter is that there is only 
one dead language that anyone need to worry 
about—dead English! And the goblins will 
get us if we don’t watch out! A young student 
may be most carefully inoculated with Hebrew 
and Greek, without having them ‘‘take” at all. 
But there is a deal of dead English fioating 
around the unsterilized nooks and crannies of 
the theological classroom and library, and in¬ 
fection by it is perilously liable to become 
chronic. A theological education sometimes 
has an effect like that of Jacob’s wrestling 
with the angel—^it leaves a man to go halting 
all his days, so far as his speech is concerned. 
His listening fiock, patiently trying to trans¬ 
late a strange, alien jargon into words of one 
syllable, shares the sentiment of Festus— 
“Much learning hath made thee mad!” All 
the preacher’s little homiletical fishes (some¬ 
times they are hardly minnows) talk like 


78 


SKYLINES 


whales! Among the many handicaps under 
which the Church of Christ works is the ele¬ 
mentary, obvious one that between the techni¬ 
cal dialect of the pulpit and the world of the 
street comer there is a great gulf fixed, across 
which must be fiung a suspension arch of sim¬ 
ple Saxon speech, before there can be any real 
communion of saints. Language has a very 
subtle influence on the thought it expresses, 
and when a preacher’s words are complex, in¬ 
volved and cloudy, his message itself cannot 
long retain clearness and simplicity. 

The writer has a vivid memory of Julius 
CiEsar’s exploits in indirect discourse, wherein 
the scoundrel Vercingetorix, instead of talk¬ 
ing face to face like a man, mumbled out his 
story through a maddening maze of subjunc¬ 
tives and uncertain participles. Only two 
memories of the writer’s school days are more 
painful—simultaneous quadratics and the 
dentist. Many ministers share at least one 
trait with imperial Csesar. They frequently 
speak in ‘indirect discourse’^ which does not 
fly straight to the mark like a bullet but ram¬ 
bles around amid thickets and bogs, “down 
dark lanes that lead nowhere.” Trying to fol¬ 
low the tangled threads of the argument is 


DEAD LANGUAGES 


79 


like wandering around the dark caverns of 
the Mammoth Cave without the friendly help 
of a guide and rope. 

Much pulpit language has died from an 
honorable cause— overwork. It has been used 
and used again until it is a thing of shreds 
and tatters, all out at the elbows, hardly fit 
clothing for a Koyal Proclamation. A stetho¬ 
scope should not be required to show that life 
has long since passed from it. We are all in¬ 
terested in pensions for worn-out preachers. 
They are richly deserved. But ought we not 
also to provide pensions for worn-out minis¬ 
terial phrases as well, so that they could be 
relieved from active service? These worthy 
phrases have wrought righteousness, from 
weakness were made strong, waxed mighty in 
war and put to fiight armies of aliens. They 
ought to be buried with all the honors of war 
instead of being rudely disturbed every Sun¬ 
day morning. On this roll of honor we would 
give a high place to such overworked language 
as ‘^over the top’’; to the omnipresent ‘^chal¬ 
lenge” and “crisis”; to all “new eras,” new 
“ages,” and new “days”; to “one hundred per 
cent Americanism”; to such pseudo-scientific 
lingo as “function” (who shall deliver us from 



80 


SKYLINES 


that particular abominatian?), ^^objective/’ 
and ^^reaction.” A very weary man cried 
out recently with a healthy impatience: 
^‘No one thinks any more; they ^react/ Let’s 
all quit ‘functioning’ and go to work!” We 
frequently read or hear it said that “prayer 
releases power.” That is unquestionably 
true. But it is just as unquestionably true 
that saying so a thousand times in the same 
threadbare words releases nothing but a sigh 
of despair. Language dead from overwork 
never achieves any divine miracles of surprise. 
The hearers go away thinking the preacher 
has “said what he ought to have said,” and 
that is the end of it. Instead of the bread of 
life, the flock has been given spiritual food 
that is more like a pretzel, “dry as the re¬ 
mainder biscuit after a voyage.” 

Frequently language has met a violent 
death—from strangling. Promising argu¬ 
ments and telling points get all tied up in 
complicated sentences and are hung by the 
neck until dead. Rebecca West, in comparing 
the early and later styles of Henry James, 
says that in his earliest works Henry James’ 
sentences were lithe and athletic; they could 
run free and unhampered; but in later years 


DEAD LANGUAGES 


81 


they were swathed in bandages of relative 
clauses like an old lady invalid wrapped in 
shawls. James Kussell Lowell, in a letter 
from Dresden, where he was struggling with 
German, gives a vivid description of strangled 
language: “What a language it is, to be sure; 
with nominatives sending out as many roots 
as that witch grass which is the pest of all 
child gardens, and sentences in which one sets 
sail like an admiral with sealed orders, not 
knowing where he is going till he is in mid¬ 
ocean 

When a man strives to attain the simplicity 
which is in Christ his effort should extend to 
language as well as character. What a mar¬ 
velous teacher of composition Jesus would; 
have been! Or, rather, what a marvelous 
teacher he is! His eye is single and the whole 
body of his discourse is full of light. He is 
come to seek and to save that which is lost, 
and his words, having only that one great pur¬ 
pose of service, and none of self-display, are as 
clear and strong as the rays of the sun through 
a burning glass. The single purpose of service 
is the preserver of sympathy in every speaker. 
Sometimes a sword is so heavy with ornament 
that it cannot be readily swung against an 


82 


SKYLINES 


enemy. And frequently a man’s style is so 
loaded down with, rhetorical decorations that 
it cannot be effective for the direct and con¬ 
vincing persuasion which marks all true 
preaching. Wherefore, laying aside every 
weight, and the (rhetorical) sin that doth so 
easily beset us, let us run vdth patience the 
race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus. 
For Jesus is not only the salvation of a man’s 
soul but of a man’s style as well. 

Pernicious anemia is the reason for much 
dead language. The words are not lively, full- 
blooded creatures with rosy cheeks. You can 
chop them up into pieces without running any 
risk of causing a hemorrhage. The language 
of the pulpit is often deficient in red corpus¬ 
cles, that is, in words with color and fire and 
music in them, words that catch and suggest 
the rich pageantry of life. It is very easy to 
be too harshly critical of the pulpit for this. 
One reason for it is greatly to the preacher’s 
credit. If he is at all mentally awake, he must 
read, mark, and inwardly digest, if possible, 
many books which are essentially textbooks, 
w^ritten in severe style, technical, philosophi¬ 
cal, and theological books. So his language 
becomes subdued to what his mind works in. 



DEAD LAN(>UAGES 


83 


A long shelf of novels and poetry is needed to 
counteract the pernicious effects on one’s vo¬ 
cabulary of a ten-volume Dictionary of Keli- 
gion and Ethics. The wife of Principal James 
Denney shrewdly noted that he was preaching 
much better since he had taken to reading 
French novels. But, alas! the preacher is 
often so crowded that he makes the mistake of 
skipping the novels instead of the dictionary! 

What wreckage stereotyped language can 
make out of the most sublime thought has per¬ 
haps never been demonstrated so convincingly 
as in the paraphrase of Hamlet’s soliloquy 
into modern ^‘jargon” in Sir Arthur Quiller- 
Couch’s ‘^The Art of Writing,” The immortal 

“To be, or not to be, 

That is the question,” 

emerges thus as many a speaker might render 
it in the omnipresent rhetorical jargon of to¬ 
day: 

‘‘To be, or the contrary? Whether the for¬ 
mer or the latter be preferable would seem to 
admit of some difference of opinion; the an¬ 
swer in the present case being of an affirmative 
or of a negative character according as to 
whether one elects on the one hand to mentally 


84 


SKYLINES 


suffer the disfavor of fortune, albeit in an ex¬ 
treme degree, or on the other to boldly envis¬ 
age adverse conditions in the prospect of even¬ 
tually bringing them to a conclusion. The 
condition of sleep is similar to, if not indis¬ 
tinguishable from, that of death; and with the 
addition of finality the former might be con¬ 
sidered identical with the latter; so that in 
this connection it might be argued with regard 
to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a 
termination would be put to the endurance of 
a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to men¬ 
tion a number of downright evils incidental to 
our fallen humanity, and thus a consumma¬ 
tion achieved of a most gratifying nature.’’ 

Quiller-Couch’s whole chapter on jargon” 
ought to be bound up between the Old and 
New Testaments in all Bibles presented to 
young preachers. 

But the most frequent cause of dead lan¬ 
guage is senility —words, phrases, and expres¬ 
sions which have passed into decrepit old age. 
This does not refer to those timeless words 
which embody the realities of God and the 
soul, which are the same yesterday, to-day and 
forever. ‘‘Senility” describes, rather, the 
period costumes with which the body of truth 


DEAD LANGUAGES 


85 


has been clothed in other centuries and gen¬ 
erations, costumes which are no more an in¬ 
tegral part of the truth of Christianity than 
was the Koman toga or the suit of armor of 
the Middle Ages an inseparable part of the 
human anatomy. The tragedy of it is that the 
ageless message of Christ to the living present 
is made, by obsolete language, as remote from 
the thought and life of the day as though it 
were expressed in the Old English of Chaucer 
or Piers Plowman. 

Ideas and watchwords which were impreg¬ 
nable defenses of the faith in days when such 
expressions spoke directly to the mind of the 
age become present obstacles. During the 
Great War it was a frequent experience for a 
regiment of soldiers in the trenches to dis¬ 
cover that the barbed-wire entanglements 
which proved so great a defense when a hos¬ 
tile drive was being withstood, became a dis¬ 
tressing obstacle when an advance movement 
over the same territory was launched. The 
same experience has befallen the church again 
and again. For instance, such an ancient de¬ 
fense of religion as the doctrine of the verbal 
inspiration of the Scriptures is to-day a vicious 
snarl of barbed wire lying athwart the path of 


86 


SKYLINES 


a united church advancing to world service. 
What obstacles lie in its meshes! It brings 
forth a resurgent premillenarianism, which, 
with gaze upturned to the clouds, passes by, 
like priest and Levite, a bruised and wounded 
world. It sustains an intensified denomina- 
tionalism. In thoughtless optimism we are 
tempted to believe that the modern under¬ 
standing of the Bible has penetrated far more 
deeply into the mind of the church than is 
the case. The recent agitated squall produced 
in England by the sermon on evolution 
preached by Canon Barnes to the British 
Science Association demonstrated that clearly. 
The sermon contained nothing which has not 
been an accepted commonplace among edu¬ 
cated Christians for a generation. Yet its 
frank acceptance of the results of evolution for 
Christian thinking brought about the head of 
the preacher a veritable hurricane of protest 
from all directions. The church has not been 
honestly teaching the foundations for a mod¬ 
ern Christian faith to the extent it should be 
doing. Too often it has been content with 
repeating the language of a literal interpreta¬ 
tion of Genesis, language which is both mean¬ 
ingless and powerless as a present apologetic 


DEAD LANGUAGES 


87 


of faith. Thus ^^the inspiration of one age be¬ 
comes the damnation of the next.’^ Such dis¬ 
cussions as the one just cited on the verbal in¬ 
spiration of Genesis, are as fitting, in view of 
the task of the church to-day, as it would have 
been fitting if, when the call to arms came to 
the United States in the World War, its young 
men had been so immersed in discussions of 
the Dred Scott decision and the Missouri Com¬ 
promise that they failed to respond. So much 
of our theological speech is reminiscent of 

“Old unhappy far-off things 
And battles long ago.” 

The principal trouble with ^^the old-time re¬ 
ligion,” which we are vociferously told was 
‘^good enough for mother,” etc., is that it is not 
old enough. Its partisans make the mistake 
of stopping in the sixteenth century instead of 
going clear back to the beginning. The ^^old- 
time religion” really worth talking about and 
living by is the religion of Abraham, a religion 
of intellectual and spiritual daring; the re¬ 
ligion of Moses, a religion of social revolution; 
the religion of Jesus, a religion of love. 

It was said of Hugh Price Hughes that ^^he 
took the ancient passion for the souls of men 


88 


SKYLINES 


and set it in the stream of modern life.” That 
is the task of every herald of the gospel—^to 
take the ancient truths and ancient passion of 
the good news of God in Christ and set them 
in the very midst of the thought life of the day, 
shorn of all accidental and obsolete accumula¬ 
tions. 

^^My sheep know my voice.” The human 
heart answers, not to the mechanical repeti¬ 
tion of a foghorn, or the ceaseless reiterations 
of a doctrinal phonograph, but to the voice of 
Him whose words are spirit and life. ^^Oh 
man, speak things!” cries Emerson to the 
preacher, in a passage that might well be car¬ 
ried in the memoi*y: 

^^At church to-day I felt how unequal is this 
match of words against things. Cease, O thou 
unauthorized talker, to prate of consolation, 
resignation, and spiritual joys in neat and bal¬ 
anced sentences. For I know these men who 
sit below. Hush quickly, for care and calam¬ 
ity are things to them. There is the shoe¬ 
maker whose daughter has gone mad, and he is 
looking up through his spectacles to see what 
you have for him. Here is my friend whose 
scholars are all leaving him and he knows not 
where to turn his hand next. Here is the stage 


DEAD LANGUAGES 


89 


driver who has jaundice and cannot get well. 
Here is B who failed last year and he is look¬ 
ing up anxiously. Speak things or hold thy 
peace!’’ 

Jesus found the language of religion all 
bound up in the graveclothes of tradition and 
laid away in the sepulcher of ceremonialism. 
And he spoke with a loud voice, ^^Come forth!” 
And the ancient words, God, Father, Son, sin, 
love, life, came forth alive, glowing with fresh¬ 
ness and power. That enlivening of words is 
a prime necessity of every age. The prophet 
must take the religious language of his time 
and say to it, ^Tn the name of Jesus of Naza¬ 
reth, ^rise up and walk!’ ” 


i 


0 


VII 

A PLEA FOR THE CONSERVATION OF 
SOME OLD-FASHIONED DISEASES 

I T has been a long time since I have heard of 
a genuine case of writers’ cramp. I do not 
know whether its extinction is due to the fact 
that Dr. Carrel has isolated the germ or 
whether the efforts of Messrs. Remington and 
Underwood have wrought our deliverance. 
Perhaps even the free-arm movement of the 
Spencerian penmanship, with its alluring cir¬ 
cles and curves, which we so painfully learned 
in the third grade and so painlessly forgot ever 
afterward, may have had something to do with 
it. At any rate, whatever the causes, few to¬ 
day seek the doctor to be cured of writers’ 
cramp. The present generation writes as eas¬ 
ily and unweariedly as it breathes. No matter 
how, in the rush and stress of the day, our 
other muscles may grow faint and utterly 
weary, the muscles of our fingers renew their 
strength with each bottle of ink emptied or 

90 



OLD-FASHIONED DISEASES 91 


typewriter ribbon worn out. A fitting coat- 
of-arms for the times might be a fountain pen 
rampant over Truth dormant, with a devil¬ 
fish squirting ink embossed on the shield. 

Hence we venture to suggest that science 
has been pushing the conquest of disease a bit 
too relentlessly. Would it not be well to con¬ 
serve at least a few score germs of writers^ 
cramp to be scattered about the community 
where they will do the greatest good? It is 
too great a servant of humanity to be allowed 
to perish from the earth. 

Suppose that some morning one of our great 
daily papers should be forced to make this 
humiliating announcement on the front page: 
^^Owing to such a large number of our staff 
being afflicted with writers’ cramp we are re¬ 
luctantly compelled to print nothing but the 
news in to-day’s issue.” 

Would it not be an occasion for the long- 
meter doxology? 

It was very significant that Armistice Day 
was celebrated in American cities with great 
snowstorms of torn paper in the streets 
dropped down from office buildings and thrown 
up into the air. For that is what has been hap¬ 
pening ever since the war closed and before, 


92 


SKYLINES 


never ending showers of white paper blown 
about by every wind of propaganda. Whole 
forests have been slaughtered to make wood 
pulp for a journalistic holiday. We read in 
the book of Acts that when the mob in Jerusa¬ 
lem w^ere unwilling to face the logic of Paul’s 
truth any longer, ^‘they threw dust in the air.” 
The present generation knows a trick of cloud¬ 
ing the issue worth two of that. It throws 
paper, far more deadly to the eyesight. How 
it would give us a chance to think, if a few 
score cases of writers’ cramp could be pre¬ 
served ! 

We have had an orgy of red, white, and 
blue lies in this land of the linotype. Red ones 
and white ones have been notably concerned 
with Russia. They have been equally imperti¬ 
nent and futile. The red lies have assured us 
daily that the Bolsheviki government was 
reeling into the pit. The white retort has in¬ 
sisted that Russia was a cruelly maligned 
Soviet paradise of prosperity and New Testa¬ 
ment brotherhood. How many anti-Soviet 
armies have pranced gallantly across the 
pages of The New York Times, for instance, 
much like the pictures of Saint George, al¬ 
ways charging but never advancing! After pur- 


OLD-FASHIONED DISEASES 93 


suing the imaginary triumphs of successive 
deliverers, Kolchak, Denkin, and Wrangel, 
till we can almost hear the rumble of Mos¬ 
cow's walls as they crash to the ground, some 
morning we meet the shocking truth, which 
can no longer be hid, that the scattered armies 
of these Napoleons are in helpless flight thou¬ 
sands of miles distant from their impending 
conquests. We have been beguiled by a fairy- 
story which puts the brothers Grimm to 
shame. Nothing remains but for the editors 
to appear after the manner of Prospero and 
announce, 

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, . . . 
were all spirits, and 
Are melted into air, into thin air.” 

I 

Small wonder that Mr. Chesterton recently 
declared that the things he liked best about 
our newspapers were the murder stories. 
There, at least, he felt comparatively safe 
from propaganda. 

And the blue lies! What ravages writers’ 
cramp would work among the liquor interests! 
Was there ever in history such a massed effort, 
involving as great a variety of literary and 
artistic talent as has been assaulting the Eigh- 


94 


SKYLINES 


teen til Amendment in many newspapers? It 
is common report in the newspaper world that 
the whole staff of many newspapers, not only 
editorial writers and reporters, but cartoon¬ 
ists, humorists, poets, and column conductors, 
have had strict orders issued to them to bend 

t 

all their efforts toward making prohibition 
look ridiculous. And reading the papers we 
can hardly doubt the truth of the rumor. No 
exploded myth seems too hoary to be dressed 
out as gayly as the best artists and able writ¬ 
ers can trim it up, and paraded like a scare¬ 
crow before the public. Recently one New 
York paper, a paper with an honorable record 
of great public seiwice to its credit, has been 
making frantic efforts in its Sunday magazine 
—commandeering noted artists and writers— 
to reanimate out of its senile decay the ancient 
lie that the prohibition amendment was slipped 
over on the great American public by the 
sleight-of-hand tricks of a few fanatics. And 
unquestionably the simple villagers who never 
get far from Broadway, and to whom Eleventh 
avenue represents the Far West, believe it. 
Newspapers in general w ill not soon recover 
from the blow to the confidence the public has 
in them, given by their concerted and gross 


OLD-FASHIONED DISEASES 95 


misinterpretation of the so-called blue-laws of 
the Lord’s Day Alliance recently, and even 
worse, their refusal to publish the statement of 
fact on the matter drawn up by citizens of un¬ 
impeachable standing and repute. 

Whatever the sinister forces in the back¬ 
ground of the present well-defined onslaught 
on public decency and reform movements, the 
myriad-fingered propagandist is in the fore¬ 
ground and any cessation of his writing pow- 
ers would be a blessing to the land. 

While we are speaking of blessings, how 
can we forget lockjaw f. What an unmixed 
boon a judicious and well timed epidemic of 
lockjaw in the United States Senate would 
be! Especially when a budding Daniel comes 
to judgment and outlines a policy of world re¬ 
lations for the United States, as seen from the 
coign of vantage of a cracker barrel in the 
general store at Corntassel Crossing. Or in 
the House of Representatives on occasion 
when the Honorable Member from Buncombe 
thunders ^^Mr. Speaker,” and starts on a three- 
hour carnival of unnecessary noise for the pur¬ 
pose of impressing home constituents a thou¬ 
sand miles away. 

What a relief a little lockjaw would bring 


96 


SKYLINES 


in the case of those monumental pieces of im¬ 
pertinence to which we are now being treated, 
when mouthpieces of the Tired Business Man 
warn the Church of Christ to renounce the 
gospel and get off the earth! Come to think 
of it, might not an intelligent epidemic of lock¬ 
jaw prove a blessing to church conferences 
and conventions? Carbon dioxide is the most 
poisonous gas known. An hour’s exhalation 
of it in the form of extemporaneous oratory is 
usually sufficient to kill any budding promise 
of useful action deader than an Egyptian 
mummy which has been embalmed for four 
thousand years. In one church organization 
of which the writer has knowledge there axe 
two topics which have been discussed for 
twelve consecutive years—a new method of 
entertainment for the sessions and new boun¬ 
daries—^vdthout an inch of progress being 
made by all the vibration of the atmosphere. 
The same speeches, with the same rebuttals, 
have returned as regularly as the robins in the 
spring, though not half so melodiously. 

In one of Principal James Denney’s letters 
to Robertson Nicoll, he speaks of a book which 
he has in contemplation and adds this com¬ 
ment, “But I don’t want to talk about it, for 


OLD-FASHIONED DISEASES 97 


the more I speak of it, the less likelihood there 
is of its ever being actually done/’ What an 
acute insight! The greatest danger of talk is 
that it is such a subtle narcotic. It gives a 
false satisfaction just as a drug does. A dis¬ 
cussion may be so eloquent that it leaves us 
with a feeling of content to let the matter rest 
there. We are lulled into the illusion that we 
have done something when it has only been 
talked about. Just as the habit of day dream¬ 
ing breaks down the will power, so energy for 
action can be hopelessly paralyzed by talk. 
‘Hf you have a spark of patriotism in you, 
water it,” once declared an Irish orator fer¬ 
vently. That frequently happens. The spark 
of decision and action is put out by a deluge 
of resonant chest tones. 

One of the many ^^Develop Your Personal¬ 
ity” courses now flourishing has an advertis¬ 
ing booklet which tells “How Silent Sims Be¬ 
came a Fluent Talker.” That is easy enough. 
What we need more is some one who can teach 
the reverse process—how to make many a 
fluent talker into a “Silent Sims.” Eic labor, 
hie opus est! 

I would not seem to be guilty of speaking 
lightly of so dreadful an affliction as locomotor 


98 


SKYLINES 


atdxia, but only to notice with commendation 
one aspect of it, that it does keep a person in 
one place. That much of it, if it could be ar¬ 
ranged painlessly and in a homeopathic de¬ 
gree, might prove at times a real boon. For 
the virtues of ^^a traveling ministry” may eas¬ 
ily be overdone. The climax of a well-con¬ 
structed drama does not come until the third 
or fourth act, and too many dramas of king¬ 
dom extension suffer by having the curtain 
rung down in the midst of the first or second 
act, just as the plot thickens and events begin 
to move to a conclusion. The scenery is 
shifted and the star moves on to begin another 
engagement elsewhere. 

The cashier of a bank in a Southern city 
remonstrated with a porter of the bank who 
always drew his wages in cash every week and 
carried them away with him, instead of de¬ 
positing part of them in the bank. The cash¬ 
ier was a bald-headed man who usually wore 
his hat when at work, to keep from catching 
cold. 

'‘Why don’t you ever deposit some of your 
money with us and save it?” he asked the por¬ 
ter. 

“Well, you see, boss,” the porter replied, 


OLD-FASHIONED DISEASES 99 


hesitatingly don’t like to give ma money to 
you—you always look as though you was jus’ 
leavin’ for somewhere.” 

Too often it proves hard to rally permanent 
strength for a church for the same reason— 
the pastor looks and acts as though he were 
“just leaving for somewhere”—as he fre¬ 
quently is. 

Some ministers, on going to a church, seem 
to follow the advice of the fire department, 
printed on theater programs: “Look about 
now and choose the nearest exit.” A church 
should always be treated as an end, never as a 
means of advancement for its minister. Some 
men use a church as a springboard, on which 
they bounce up and down for a year or so 
until they gain enough momentum to vault 
them up to some other spot. And the King¬ 
dom suffers from such athletic prowess. A 
little less mobility would result surely in more 
of those permanent benefits which take time to 
nourish and grow in any community. 

There is another aspect of the work of the 
church in which just a tendency toward loco¬ 
motor ataxia might prove a great blessing. 
That is the custom of ecclesiastical rearrange¬ 
ment which masquerades under the guise of 


) 

% 

) > 
> ) 

'i ) ) 


) 


) 

> 


100 


SKYLINES 


promotion. As soon as a man demonstrates 
fine ability in one place he is summarily re¬ 
moved and set to doing something entirely dif¬ 
ferent. How would a baseball team fare if as 
soon as a man proved to be a star shortstop he 
were immediately ^^promoted’’ to the pitcher^s 
box, while the fellow who dared to make good 
as a catcher w^ould be dragged aAvay from it 
and ^^promoted’^ to the outfield? ^^One star 
differeth from another in glory’’ on the ball 
field just as surely as in the heavens, but the 
manager who produces a winning team keeps 
the stars where they shine best, instead of in¬ 
dulging a passion for changing the line-up. 
Yet in the church the theory seems frequently 
to be, ^When a man makes good in any field, 
stop him right away and put him somewhere 
else.” Is he a strong, competent pastor? 
Away with such a fellow! Make him a dis¬ 
trict superintendent! Is he an effective 
preacher? Stop him—make him an editor! 
Is he doing great things in a rural charge? 
Quick! Catch him! Send him traveling 
around the country! Has he done great 
service as a board secretary? Ah, we’ll 
soon put an end to that! Make him a bishop! 
Anything so long as the nice round pegs are 


OLD-FASHIONED DISEASES 101 


pulled out of the round holes and pounded 
into others, whether square or round! 

There is a far better theory of promotion 
than that, which will yield many fold more re¬ 
sults, Tennyson calls it ‘^the glory of going 
on/’ Instead of so much of the game of eccle¬ 
siastical “stagecoach” where every one changes 
chairs, we might try a policy suggested a long 
time ago—“Stand still and see the salvation 
of God.” We are liable to miss a good deal of 
it by gadding around. 


VIII 


THE HIGHER HOOLIGANISM 
OU will not find the word in the older 



dictionaries, but you will find the thing 
most anywhere. ^^Hooliganism^’ is rowdyism. 
It is lawless ruffianism. A ^ffiooligan” is 
an extreme individualist in conduct, whose 
only conception of law is that of a nuisance to 
be avoided. The word comes from London 
and typifies the street-corner loafer who flour¬ 
ishes in such great numbers there. 

A few years before his death Lord Roberts 
warned England that her greatest danger was 
not from some outside power, but from ^ffiooli- 
ganism^’ within the kingdom. It was ^hooli¬ 
ganism” which Lloyd George had in mind 
when he said, ^^You cannot have an A-1 em¬ 
pire with a C-3 population.” 

One of the popular cults now flourishing in 
the United States, finding luxuriant expres¬ 
sion in current literature, is the ^higher hooli¬ 
ganism”;—a rarefied, dignified and deified 


102 


THE HIGHER HOOLIGANISM 103 


form of tlie more familiar and crude lawless¬ 
ness of the street-comer ruffian. 

In a score of novels and other books, in cur¬ 
rent literature and practice, the viewpoint of 
the gangster with an equal contempt for law 
and respectability has been elevated into some¬ 
thing resembling a well-defined philosophy. 
At heart this philosophy is only the ideal 
of the thug: ^H’m going to get mine, boys,^^ 
but it masquerades as the latest discov¬ 
ery in psychology or the latest revelation in 
ethics. 

Perhaps the best definition of the ^ffiigher 
hooliganism^^ is to be found in the course of a 
Boswellian panegyric laid at the feet of the 
high priest of the cult, H. L. Mencken, in a 
recent number of The 'New Republic, The 
worshiper gravely chants: ^‘He [Mencken] 
has had the fearlessness to avoid the respect¬ 
able and the wholesome, those two devils, 
which so often betray in the end even the most 
intelligent of Americans.’’ There you have it! 
The crowning touch of genius —^^awoiding the 
respectable and the wholesome/’ It is that 
rare form of genius which presides over the 
current Eleusinian mysteries of the indecent 
and vulgar. 


104 


SKYLINES 


This aversion to the wholesome and respect¬ 
able is an enlightenment which takes itself 
quite seriously. It flowers in poetry and litera¬ 
ture, as well as in actual practice in social 
relations. It is not merely the usual immoral 
reaction after the war; it has resemblances to 
the high spiritual exaltation of the advent of 
a new religion, with its slogan, ^^Self-ex¬ 
pression is God, and Freud is its prophet.” It 
throws overboard such bourgeois terms as 
^^sin” and ^^salvation” and in their place puts 
those blessed words, ^Tnhibition” and ^‘com¬ 
plex.” 

Edna Ferber, in The Girls, puts into the 
mouth of one of her characters a fair summary 
of the philosophy of the cult: ^Tf you kids 
don’t do, say, and feel everything that comes 
into your heads you go around screaming 
about inhibitions. If you new-generation 
youngsters don’t yield to every impulse you 
think you’re being stunted.” Or, as another 
one of the characters in the same book puts it, 
^^Kun away with the iceman, or join a circus, 
or take up bare-legged dancing—anything to 
express yourself before it’s too late.” 

Now, new religions and cults have strangely 
familiar echoes about them, and the present 


THE HIGHER HOOLIGANISM 105 


glorious gospel of ^^no inhibitions’’ makes us 
wonder (though not for very long) where we 
have seen it before. For the new psychology, so 
called, is in large part old license, and a large 
part of the new freedom and unconventional¬ 
ity is a throw-back to the Stone Age. 

The ultra-modern hero bears strange resem¬ 
blances to the ^^Neanderthaler Man.” Being 
up-to-the-minute in ^^emancipation from 
cramping tradition” means going back to the 
Glacial Age. 

The same thing in music which is happening 
in morals has been most suggestively pointed 
out by Sir Frederick Corder, curator of the 
Royal Academy of Music in London, in a re¬ 
cent number of the Musical Quarterly. He 
calls the fad for freak music ^^the cult of the 
wrong note.” He recognizes a widespread, un¬ 
healthy boom in freak music, which disregards 
the laws of harmony. This exaltation of un- 
harmonious discord as ^^music” parallels the 
hysteria known as “Futurism” and “Cubism” 
in art. 

“Unmeaning bunches of notes,” says Sir 
Frederick, “appear representing the composer 
promenading the key-board in his boots. Some 
compositions can be played better with the 


106 


SKYLINES 


elbows, others with the flat of the hand; some 
require Angers to perform or ears to listen to. 
Yet we have to face the fact that audiences 
have sat for the most part unmoved while 
someone has gravely played the piano to them 
like a two-year-old child.” 

So we have ^^the cult of the wrong note” in 
morals. Gross self-indulgence acclaims itself 
as “freedom from a miserly Puritanism” and 
is a cult “of the wrong note”; an unharmoni- 
ous “jazz” in the ethical world. In sufficiently 
enlightened circles the keynote of the hour is 
“Instincts to the quarter-deck!” “The fear of 
the Lord,” which was mistakenly supposed to 
be “the beginning of wisdom,” has given place 
to the terrible Freudian fear of the conse¬ 
quences of disobedience to one’s instincts. 
“Have I the right to disobey this instinct?” 
asks the hesitant soul. Echo answers, “No!” 
The only divine right to which we need pay 
any attention is the right to be amused. The 
rights of others are mere nothings to which a 
strong man or woman pays no attention. The 
lusts and the higher faculties are set down at 
the board of life, and served with an impartial 
hand. 

Toward religion the attitude of many self- 


THE HIGHEE HOOLIGANISM 107 


styled ^^young intellectuals’’ is that which 
Lytton Strachey attributes to James A. 
Froude, 'when Froude lost his faith: ^Tn 
Fronde’s case the loss of his faith turned out 
to be rather like the loss of a heavy portman¬ 
teau which one afterward discovered to have 
been full of old rags and brickbats.” 

Current literature abounds in emancipation 
proclamations put out by high-souled rebels 
against moral conventions. These declara¬ 
tions abound in those delicious terms ^^bour¬ 
geois” and ‘‘Victorian.” What mouth-filling 
satisfaction that word “Victorian” must give! 
All that is execrable, self-complacent, knavish, 
hypocritical, indecent, is summed up in it. 
A simple soul might think that future genera¬ 
tions may possibly regard the time of Thack- 
ery, Dickens, George Eliot, George Meredith, 
Thomas Hardy, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, 
Newman and Huxley, Spencer, Darwin and 
Mill as one perhaps worthy of a little honor, 
but such a childish idea only shows him to be a 
simple soul who belongs in the sub-primary 
grade. 

We can get a delightful close-up of the 
“higher hooliganism” in the person of one of its 
corps commanders, H. L. Mencken, whose 


108 


SKYLINES 


three volumes of Prejudices are bright orna¬ 
ments of American letters. 

Mencken is the ^Teck^s Bad Boy’’ of Ameri¬ 
can literature. His school of criticism might 
be called the ^Teck’s Bad Boy” school. Its 
principle of judgment seems to be: ^^There goes 
someone across the street who looks respect¬ 
able,” and immediately there is let fly a volley 
of stones and vegetables amid chortles of ribald 
laughter. 

Mencken is a vivacious and entertaining 
writer. In the slang parlance of yesterday, 
‘^He whirls a wicked sling shot.” He hits hard 
and frequently hits someone we all like to see 
assaulted. No one can stand for a whole day 
on a street corner throwing stones promiscu¬ 
ously without hitting one of the town’s hum¬ 
bugs, and Mencken has punctured many a hum¬ 
bug. He admits that he is a critic. Dip down 
into the crystal stream of his judgments and 
pull up a chance specimen to get his quality 
and fragrance. 

Take Dante for instance. The ^‘Divine Com¬ 
edy,” Mr. Mencken tells us, ^ds mostly piffle.” 
What refreshing freedom from narrow tradi¬ 
tionalism is here! Such judgment does not reek 
of a musty conservatism. 


THE HIGHER HOOLIGANISM 109 


Siidermann'S The Indian Lily^ he tells us, 
‘^contains some of thfe best stories that German 
or any other language can offer,and he tells 
us why in the following words: ^^They are mor¬ 
dant, succinct, extraordinarily vivid character 
studies, each full of penetrating irony and sar¬ 
donic pity, each with a chill wind of disillusion 
blowing through it, each preaching that life is a 
hideous farce—that good and bad are almost 
meaningless words—that truth is only the lie 
that is easiest to believe.’’ That is real litera¬ 
ture. “The chill wind of disillusion telling us 
that life is a hideous farce.” That’s the stuff! 

His chief scorn is reserved for the contempt¬ 
ible thing he calls virtue. “No virtuous man,” 
he reveals to us, “that is, virtuous in the Y. 
M. C. A. sense, has ever painted a picture 
worth looking at, or written a symphony worth 
hearing, or a book worth reading. And it is 
highly probable that the thing has never been 
done by a virtuous woman either.” {Prejudi¬ 
ces —First Series.) 

Poor Browning! poor Hawthorne! To think 
how hard they tried to produce literature with¬ 
out realizing they lacked the extremely neces¬ 
sary qualification—immorality! Think of the 
poor women striving to write to-day who are 



110 


SKYLINES 


doomed to pitiable failure because they are 
handicapped by the millstone of virtue. 

Mr. Mencken lets us into the secret of good 
literature, when he tells us, in Prejudices^ that 
^^one of the principal wellsprings of art is im¬ 
propriety.” What a future for literature this 
discovery opens up! What epics, what dramas, 
what novels may we not expect when we can 
only get people saturated thoroughly enough 
with impropriety! 

But Mr. Mencken does not limit his attention 
to literature. He is a critic of social and politi¬ 
cal life as well. His exceptional qualifications 
for this office cannot be doubted after reading 
his article ^^On Living in the United States,” in 
a recent number of The Nation^ in w'hich he 
makes known to us that ‘‘The American people, 
taking them by and large, are the most timor¬ 
ous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of 
serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under 
one flag in Christendom since the fall of the 
Eastern Empire.” (Prohibition must go pretty 
hard with him to stir him up to such a pitch!) 

“Marriage,” he tells us, “is just a series of 
frauds. It begins with the fraud that the im¬ 
pulse to it is lofty, unearthly, and disinter¬ 
ested.” 


THE HIGHER HOOLIGANISM 111 


The following judgment on William Allen 
White delicately indicates what Mr. Mencken 
thinks of a large section of American civiliza¬ 
tion : ^^What White gives is exactly the sort of 
mush that is on tap in the Chautauquas. In 
the Heart of a Fool, like A Certain Rich Man, 
is aimed deliberately and with the utmost ac¬ 
curacy at the delicate gizzard of the small town 
Yokel, the small town Yokel male, the barrel- 
end product of the fifty years of direct primary, 
the little red school house, and the Christian 
Endeavor.’^ 

The three chief blots on America, according 
to Mr. Mencken, are: The Methodist Church, 
the Y. M. C. A. and the Anti-Saloon League. 
He hates democracy and adores supermen. 

We suddenly remind ourselves that all this 
sounds strangely familiar. Where have we seen 
it before? Then unmistakably there comes be¬ 
fore our mind a picture of a man in gray uni¬ 
form and a spiked helmet and a leer on a Teu¬ 
tonic face, for Mr. Mencken’s ideas on things 
American express superbly certain Teutonic 
views of politics, morals, women, beer, and 
literature. 

We have given doubtless to Mr. Mencken 
more attention than he deserves, for he is by no 


112 


SKYLINES 


means the whole cult of self-expressionists, but 
he is a symptom and a protagonist of the dark 
stage as described by William Lyon Phelps: 
^When enthusiasm, high hopes, and true faith 
seem childish, when wit and mockery take the 
place of zeal, this diabolical substitution seem¬ 
ing for the moment to be an intellectual ad¬ 
vance.” 

We are undergoing a surfeit of realistic 
novels whose chief claim to notice is that thev 
parade things which are ordinarily hidden; 
paraded for the simple reason that they are 
usually hidden. The ideal of this realism (and 
it is remarkable how often the particular type 
of realism is sex realism) is to take a photo¬ 
graph with the details very clear. Whether the 
thing was ever worth photographing or not is a 
minor question. 

The photograph of a row of garbage cans 
might be extremely well done, and yet not 
worth doing, and it w^ould not be hard to name 
a number of recent novels which have many 
points in common with a row of garbage cans. 

Mr. Heywood Broun, in The New York 
World, commenting on the novel Cytherea, 
rudely points out that w’hat is pompously 
brought forth as a new psychology of sex is 


THE HIGHER HOOLIGANISM 113 


simply parading in print things which are 
common obscenities discussed by school boys 
in every generation! 

The underlying assumption found again and 
again in many present-day popular novels is 
that a person’s supreme business is so called 
^^development/’ self-expression, self-indulg¬ 
ence, beside which the rights of others or the 
great idea of the obligation to render service 
to the world never appears at all. 

The ‘^higher hooliganism” will doubtless not 
spend a great time with us as a popular 
philosophy. It is important to strip the mas¬ 
querade off what has decked itself out as the 
last word in ^^progress” and stamp it for 
what it is, a return to the morals of the pig 
pen. The cry ^^On to Utopia” as voiced by 
such prophets means ^‘Back to the jungle.” 

Freedom from the constraint of morality 
and decency, freedom from the ideals and ob¬ 
ligations of service, are false notes that make 
discord, not harmony; a strident jangle, and 
not beauty. 

There are fundamental insights in men 
which cannot long be deceived and which 
clamor with an insistence not to be denied. 
This fundamental insight of the heart has been 


114 


SKYLINES 


n;, 

well expressed bj S. M. Hutchinson in the 
notable words of Mark Sabre in If Winter 
Comes: ^^There^s some universal thing that’s 
wanting. I tell you that plumb down in the 
crypt and abyss of every man’s heart is a 
hunger, a craving for other food than this 
earthly rubbish. Dancing and picture shows 
and life’s a jolly good thing and beer drink¬ 
ing and singing music-hall songs and dancing 
jazz—there’s nothing in all that to lift a man 
to God. Light—light. Man wants light!” 


IX 


THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION AT 

GLEN 


P erhaps I should call it the Apostolic 
Procession. For procession it was which 
itinerated its eloquent way in and out among 
the hills and dales of Glen and through the 
pulpit of the little white church on the hill. 

I do not suppose that the Bishop was ever 
conscious of the existence of Glen (bishops 
must think of many things) except as a name 
to be read off vdth firm Episcopal voice, in 
those moments of well-nigh Pontifical solem- 
nitv which mark the close of an Annual Con- 
ference. Then the name of Glen emerged 
from its modest seclusion, appearing on the 
horizon like the faint glimpse of a disappear¬ 
ing periscope, when the sentence was pro¬ 
nounced, ^^Glen—to be supplied.’’ 

And supplied it was. Sometimes with this, 
sometimes with, that, but always, let it be 
gratefully said, with some of that promised 
Grace sufficient for all needs. That is why I 

115 


116 


SKYLINES 


I 


call it an Apostolic Succession. For the fire 
did not die upon the altar, no matter with 
what disconcerting frequency the voice in the 
pulpit changed from tenor to bass, and then a 
season of baritone. My vision of the itinerant 
parade was only the fleeting one of a summer 
parishioner; and if fond memory brings to 
light impressions that may seem not over¬ 
whelmingly apostolic, I beg you to believe that 
it was not because the real ministry of Grace 
escaped my unlighted eye and heart, but that 
the human nature of the saints in the pulpit 
etched indelible portraits. 

In that gallery none stand out with firmer 
line than the occupant of the pulpit our first 
summer. It was Mary who first called him 
^^Casabianca,’’ and Casabianca he has re¬ 
mained to us ever since. It was no slighting 
term, for Casabianca was one of her girlhood 
heroes. But as we listened to the preacher 
from week to week the resemblance between 
himself and 

“The boy [who] stood on the burning deck 
Whence all but he had fled” 

was too unmistakable to be overlooked. 

For Casabianca was always occupying posi- 


THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 117 


tions from which the hosts of Zion had passed 
on. He had a curate contra mundum manner 
which gave the impression of defying the 
world in a lone and heroic defense of ancient 
theological battlefields. He had occasional 
lapses into the present century and wayward 
disgressions from the sternly theological into 
the human, but as a rule his heart lovingly 
traveled the road to yesterday. Nothing which 
an evil and adulterous generation had brought 
forth could shahe his adamantine loyalty to 
the faith once delivered to the saints (particu¬ 
larly to those who lived in the early part of the 
nineteenth century). 

Let it not be thought that it was Brother 
Casabianca’s ^^orthodoxy” which gently dis¬ 
tressed me. I have been an occasional indul- 
ger in orthodoxy myself for several years and 
quite relish it, particularly its mellow and 
milder blends. It was, rather, his conception 
of the preacher’s function as a sort of belliger¬ 
ent watchman of a geological museum in 
which were preserved in petrified form the 
creeds and articles of religion. He was quite 
willing to lead us through the museum, and 
show us all the specimens and relics, but 
sternly inveighed against the enormity of 


118 


SKYLINES 


touching any of them. We were not so much 
conscious of the Kock of Ages as of the dust 
of ages. 

I have often wondered how he had managed 
to keep himself unspotted from the corrupting 
influence of new ideas, as though he were sus¬ 
pended in a protecting theological vacuum. 
Perhaps that was what had happened. I am 
sure, however, that the role of a theological 
Hamlet was congenial to him. 

“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, 

That ever I was bom to set it right!” 

He was willing to set it right, but I am sure 
that such a task was never a cursed spite to 
him. There is a keen thrill of pleasure in de¬ 
fying the world, and Casablanca luxuriated 
in setting it right. 

One Sunday afternoon after a morning at¬ 
tack which left Darwin and Huxley and a 
whole faculty of higher critics strewn van¬ 
quished on the field, I gently asked him 
whether such valiant warfare was not perhaps 
an unnecessary regimen for the flock. And 
then I delivered myself into his hands by mak¬ 
ing a quotation from Anatole France: ^Thil- 
osophical systems are like those thin threads of 


THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 119 


platinum that are inserted in astronomical 
telescopes to divide the field into equal parts. 
These filaments are useful for the accurate ob¬ 
servation of the heavenly bodies, but they are 
not part of the heavens. It is good to have 
threads of platinum in telescopes; but we 
must not forget it was the instrument-maker 
who put them there.” 

“DonT you think you may have some plat¬ 
inum strings in the view of the heavens you 
give us?” I hopefully insinuated. 

His crushing reply was that Anatole France 
was an agnostic, which clincher I was not pre¬ 
pared to deny. 

Brother Casabianca’s malady was the sim¬ 
ple one of our old friend of nursery days: 

“Tom, Tom, the piper’s son, 

He learned to play when he was young 
And the only tune that he could play 
Was ‘Over the Hills and Far Away.*** 

Our ministerial piper had learned to play 
his one tune in a far-away day, and every 
Lord^s Day morning he piped us ^^over the 
hills and far away,” regardless of the fact that 
right at hand was greened pasture for the 
fiock. Back on the desert hills of past issues 


120 


SKYLINES 


he was feeding the flock on a diet of thistles. 

Another summer introduced us to the Rev. 
Peter Bell, who stepped bodily out of Words¬ 
worth : 

“A primrose by a river’s brim 
A yellow primrose was to him, 

And it was nothing more.” 

I never knew a truer man than Brother Bell 
nor a more faithful one—nor (if you have 
tears prepare to shed them now) one less 
guilty of arson. He carried no combustibles. 
In the story of the Ugly Duckling the cat 
asked the duckling, ^Uan you emit sparks?” 
The poor, embarrassed creature had to admit 
that it could not. Neither could Brother Bell. 
Even when his mind collided on Easter morn¬ 
ing with the most explosive truth known to 
men, the resurrection of Jesus, the result was 
not a detonation which shook dead souls wide 
awake, but a prim and precise sequence of 
premises and conclusions. He seemed to 
carry the dynamite of the word in sealed cases 
of language so conventional and stereotyped 
that it never escaped, just as the most deadly 
explosives may be safely handled if they are 
covered with a hard enough crust. 

Knowledge and sincerity were in his every 


THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 121 


utterance, but too scant an imagination to 
breathe into them the breath of life. He was 
like a man shoveling ton after ton of excellent 
coal into a furnace, quite unconscious of the 
trifling fact that the Are was not alight. 

*‘Said Life to Art: ‘I love thee best 
Not when I find in thee 
My very face and form expressed 
With dull fidelity, 

“ ‘But when in thee my longing eyes 
Behold continually 
The mystery of my memories 
And all I crave to be.’ ” 

Yet I am deeply grateful to Peter Bell and 
other pedestrian preachers, for one rich boon. 
They have lured me into a detailed study of 
the Hymnal—a memorable enrichment of any 
man’s life. This is a shameless confession to 
make, and it brings remorse even to a seared 
conscience, to think of the sinful dexterity I 
achieved, with due practice, of reading through 
the Hymn Book with keen delight, while pre¬ 
senting to the preacher the encouragement of 
a perfect picture of engrossed attention to the 
sermon. 

What marriages made in heaven the Hymn 
Book reveals—the perfect union of words and 


122 


SKYLINES 


music! Such a happy marriage as far instance, 
^^Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” By 
what providential courtship were the hymn 
and tune ever united, to have and to hold as 
long as they both shall live? It is like a fav¬ 
orable trade wind which swoops down on your 
little yawl sagging in the doldrums and bears 
it away to the strong pull of a tropical gulf 
stream. But I see I have forgotten Brother 
Bell again, as of old, w^hile strolling through 
the enchanted Hymn Book. 

It is hard to indicate the warmth of affec¬ 
tion which Glen had for the toiler who mobi¬ 
lized its resources during the war. It does 
not subtract a mite from the affection that it 
was wreathed at times with a smile. 

Never did we sit in so electric an atmosphere 
or so feel the move and stir of things. There 
was little danger that during his ministration 
we should be attacked with sleeping sickness, 
though we were never so sure of feeling im¬ 
mune from Saint Vitus dance. It was during 
the war that we first associated him with Lons- 
fellow^s gallant hero, the immortal Paul Ee- 
vere, always 

“Ready to ride and spread the alarm. 

Through every Middlesex village and farm.” 


THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 123 


So we bestowed the name on him with lov¬ 
ing pride. For he was a homiletical Paul Ke- 
vere—bringing the breathless message of some 
new crisis or emergency with nearly every 
appearance. His sermons were a series of 
“Alarums and Excursions.^’ Stopford Brooke 
said of Kingsley: “All of his books scream. 
If he tells you it is five o’clock, it seems as if 
it were the last hour of the world.” Thus it 
seemed with the stirring messages at Glen. 
He was an awakener—and we sorely needed 
awakening. There is a tremendous need in the 
ministry for the galloping messenger who 
ciies, “Awake! Awake! O Zion, put on thy 
strength!” 

We could not help wondering, however, 
whether a Paul Eevere dashing along the Bos- 
ton-to-Concord road night after night might 
not have been a bit overstimulating to the 
nerves of even the sturdiest patriots. Man 
does not live by drives alone, nor by crises or 
momentous issues, but by every word that pro- 
ceedeth out of the mouth of God. And not 
all the words of God are fire alarms or re¬ 
veilles. Some are the calm, steadying words 
of a quiet faith. They do not echo with “the 
hurry of hoofs in the village street.” 



124 


SKYLINES 


They are such words as “Be still and know 
that I am God/’ and “They that wait upon 
the Lord shall renew their strength.” 

Brother Kevere’s challenges disturbed our 
sluggishness with gratifying effectiveness, 
and for that we are deep in his debt. They 
left us, however, with a kind of nervous jerki- 
ness of faith which is quite not the same thing 
as the staying power of robust vigor. If it 
was not the war, it was a doctrinal danger 
that portended, a crisis in missions, a local 
duty of unsuspected immediacy or urgency of 
an aggi*essive evangelistic campaign. The 
very variety of these successive challenges 
was at times beAvildering, as our leader seemed 
like the hero of one of Stephen Leacock’s 
Non-sense Novels who “mounted his horse and 
rode rapidly off in all directions.” 

Needless to say. Brother Revere thrived 
lustily during the war and the campaigns 
which punctuated it with exclamation points. 
Church life was one drive after another. Each 
week seemed to disclose an impending issue 
which called for taut nerves and the mobili¬ 
zation of all our forces. Thank God, he helped 
us to play more worthily our little part in 
truly great days and actions. Yet exercise 


THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 125 


without food is a precarious business for a 
permanent undertaking. Men cannot live on 
a call to arms. Underneath are the everlast¬ 
ing arms. And while it is important to face 
our tasks it is more important to face God. 
^Tn returning and rest shall be your strength.” 

Itinerants still come and go at Glenn, but 
the spirit of God remains, strangely undis¬ 
turbed by the ecclesiastical merry-go-round, 
and speaks a various language through them 
all. With each new dispensation of the Bishop 
and his cabinet of ministering angels, the flock 
summons its soul and sings: 

“Come let us anew 
Our journey pursue. 

Roll round with the year 
Till the Master appear.” 

And the flock rejoices in the grace of a versa¬ 
tile God who fulfills himself in many men lest 
one good pastor should corrupt the world. 


THE FUNERAL MARCH OF A 
MARIONETTE 


T hat haunting little melody of Gounod^s, 
“The Funeral March of a Marionette/^ 
was fixed in my memory at the age of twelve, 
as eternally as the tunes set in the teeth of a 
barrel-organ. 

Anyone who has ever had a little sister learn 
a new piece on the piano will know why. When¬ 
ever a member of the family struggles to the 
mastery of a new piece, it is a fine demonstra¬ 
tion of the solidarity of the human race. Then, 
if ever, father and mother can repeat the an¬ 
cient formula without the least trace of cant, 
“This hurts me more than it does you.” While 
the frantic struggle with the notes goes on, 
the family reaches that height of fellowship 
in pain described in the hymn, 

“We share our mutual woes, 

Our mutual burdens bear; 

And often for each other flows 
The sympathizing tear.*’ 

126 


THE FUNERAL MARCH 


127 


The experience is one which approaches 
PauFs classic words, “The whole creation—or 
at least the whole family—groaneth and tra- 
vaileth in pain.’^ But at last Ethel reached 
the summits of harmony and the melody was 
graven in my soul. 

The title of the piece has always remained 
alluring. Why a funeral march for a marion¬ 
ette? What tragedy befell the quaint little 
fellow pulled by strings? How did he come to 
his sudden end? Surely a lively dance would 
be much more fitting to bear the name of such 
an agile creature! 

Then the picturesque significance of the 
title leaps out on us, if we loose the check rein 
of our imagination a bit. For a marionette 
always moves to a funeral march. When the 
forces which move a person are strings pulled 
from the outside rather than the self-willed 
and directed movement of his own mind and 
heart, he is parading in a funeral march, how¬ 
ever nimble and prodigious his pirouettings 
may be. To the human doll pulled about by 
strings in other fingers than his own, life is a 
dolFs funeral march, even though the tempo 
be lively and fast. 

Many a social parade which glitters like a 


128 


SKYLINES 


Koman triumph is a procession of marionettes 
from whom real life, in all the glorious mean¬ 
ings of that word, has passed away. 

“To dress, to dine, to call, to break 
No canon of the social code. 

The little laws that lackeys make 
' The future decalogue of mode. 

How many a soul for these things lives 
With pious passion, grave intent, 

And never in dreams has seen 

The things that are most excellent!” 

What a definition of life! For some words 
Webster and the Standard Dictionary suffice, 
but for the real tremendous words—for the 
tremendous little word —there is only 

one adequate dictionary—the New Testament! 
When we climb up to the Lookout Point of 
some great peak of the Gospels we see that 
there is only one fitting tune for a marionette 
whose soul is never shaken by the volcano of a 
great affirmation. The tune is a funeral 
march. 

There are marionettes of all sorts. Fascin¬ 
ating books have been written about the in¬ 
genious and surpassing antics made possible 
by skilled manipulators of the little dolls. 
They give a great semblance of life. The 


THE FUNERAL MARCH 


129 


strings are all covered up. But they are only 
puppet shows after all. 

It is tremendously important for us to 
know, before we learn to dance, to move, to 
speak at the pull of the strings, what we sur¬ 
render in so doing. Emerson raises a milepost 
at the point where true living ends and the 
funeral parade begins: ^^When you said, ^As 
others do, so will I. I renounce—I am sorry 
for it—my early vision. I must eat the good 
of the land and let learning and romantic ex¬ 
pectations go, until a more convenient season’ 
—then died the man in you.” ^Tf people say,” 
Emerson advises elsewhere, The spring is 
beautiful,’ think whether it is or not before 
you weakly answer Tes’ ”! It was said of Tho- 
reau that it was easier for him to say ^^no” 
than ‘‘yes.” But in that he was an exception. 
For most of us it is very much easier to say 
“ves,” and in that fatal ease there lies the 
making of many a marionette. 

The opposite of a marionette is not a rebel. 
In these days when unconventionality itself 
has become a convention, to be a rebel is a 
very easy and popular pose and one which re¬ 
sults usually in nothing. The true opposite of 
a marionette is “man alive.” The difference is 



130 


SKYLINES 


that between a tug and a barge. Both may be 
going with the current, but the tug is under 
its own steam and rudder, while the barge is 
pulled by strings. 

When we have a whole nation of marionettes 
the national anthem is a funeral march. The 
end is in sight. The vital problem in America 
to-day is that of preserving a thinking democ¬ 
racy. A thinking minority, perhaps, is all 
that we can hope for. But it must be large 
and strong enough to keep great aims and 
ideals active in the life of the nation. These 
are the days of quantity production of ideas 
as well as of machines, and such quantity pro¬ 
duction of programs and opinions is a great 
machinelike force for the making of thought¬ 
less human dolls. The line of least resistance 
when we feel the squeeze of the crowd is to 
conform to the popular molds of near-thought. 

On the island of Saint Lucie there Tvas just 
one coat among the whole population and the 
natives used to wear it in turn as they made 
their appearance before the king. That suc¬ 
cessive appearance of the solitary coat is a 
picture of what goes on in much more civilized 
communities when we all borrow our neigh¬ 
bors’ opinions in which to make our public ap- 


THE FUNERAL MARCH 


131 


pearance. There is a haunting expression fre¬ 
quently used, ‘‘The cry of the lost soul/’ We 
have often tried to imagine what it must be 
like. Usually the expression suggests the 
lone, weird howl of a coyote on a cold night. 
But in reality the cry of a lost soul may be a 
giggle, a laugh, a hurrah, a sigh of content— 
any vocal sign of the surrender of self-deter¬ 
mination. 

Robert Browning wrote some words to the 
funeral march: 

"‘Just for a handful of silver he left us. 

Just for a riband to stick in his coat; 

Pound the one gift of which fortune bereft us, 
Lost'all the others she lets us devote.” 

William Lyon Phelps thus describes Brown¬ 
ing’s aversion to marionettes: “Browning can 
forgive any daring criminal; but he cannot 
forgive the man who is selfishly satisfied with 
his attainments and position, and thus accepts 
compromises with life. The soul that ceases 
to grow is utterly damned. The damnation of 
contentment is shown with beauty and fervor 
in one of Browning’s earliest lyrics, ^Over the 
Seas Our Galleys Went’ The voyagers were 
weary of the long journey. They heeded not 


132 


SKYLINES 


the voice of the pilot Conscience/’ There is an 
interesting echo of this in William Allen 
White’s judgment that ‘‘Contentment is more 
wicked than red anarchy.” 

Sometimes we become lifeless marionettes 
by the suppression of our emotions. Genuine 
emotions are costly and inconvenient things. 
They throw us out of the easy lockstep. They 
are frowned on as uncouth in the best circles. 
A bit of recent free verse is a panoramic pho¬ 
tography of a section of human society: 

“We have made cages 
Around all our emotions 
And we walk 
Quite safely 

In the zoo in which we have put them 

And feed them 

Peanuts.” 

We live by admiration, hope, and love. By 
great surging emotions we are lifted out of 
entangling strings into the glorious liberty of 
the sons of God. When authentic emotions 
are asphyxiated, life, in the New Testament 
sense, is gone. 

Sometimes we are strangled by an obsession 
for rules and precedence and the mechanics of 
living. One of Yale’s notable football players. 


THE FUNEKAL MARCH 


133 


^^Curley” Corliss, had a command which he fre¬ 
quently gave in a game, which would serve as 
a fine life motto: “Never mind the signals, 
give me the ball!^’ he would cry. That was 
the main thing. Signals are all very well if 
they help to advance the ball. But many peo¬ 
ple get so concerned with the signals that they 
forget the ball and the purpose of the game 
entirely. Especially in religion is it tragically 
easy to forget the main thing. Many nomi¬ 
nally religious people do not even know 
whether the ball is advancing down the field or 
not. In their lust for signals they have forgot¬ 
ten touchdowns. This kind of strings makes 
marionettes of religious leaders. They get lost 
in the whirl of organization and mechanism. A 
great many gatherings of church officials end 
like the immortal episode recorded in Mother 
Goose, especially when social and economic 
questions are discussed: 

“Four and twenty tailors 
Went to kill a snail. 

The best man amongst them 
Durst not touch her tail. 

She put out her horns, 

Like a little Keyloe cow. 

Run, tailors run. 

Or she'll catch you all just now!” 


134 


SKYLINES 


N: 


There is in nearly every church gathering 
an efficient corps of ecclesiastical dentists who 
pull the teeth of resolutions, until they are as 
harmless as a baby kitten. A little boy once 
watched a minister in one of the old-fashioned 
inclosed pulpits waxing eloquent at the top 
of his voice and shaking his fists. ‘‘Oh, 
mother,” he cried, “what if he should get out!” 
That is just the tragedy of it. So frequently he 
never gets out. Or if he does, he is as tame as a 
lamb. 

Sometimes economic interests pull the 
strings. And they give a violent jerk. None 
of us can wholly escape from them. So firmly 
attached are the economic strings that our 
protests against them are often merely 
formal, and the world recognizes that they are 
formal. During the wedding of the Princess 
Mary of England in the spring of 1922, the pro¬ 
ceedings were marked by a quaint survival of a 
historical custom of the Middle Ages. West¬ 
minster Abbey is what is known as a royal 
church and entirely independent of episcopal 
control, even of the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
the head of the Church of England. So when 
the Archbishop arrived the chapter clerk of 
the Abbey read a formal protest against his 


THE FUNERAL MARCH 


135 


presence in accordance with the traditional 
custom. But meanwhile everything went on 
without the least attention paid to the protest. 
Everyone knew that it did not really mean 
anything. In just the same manner the dec¬ 
larations of the church protesting against un- 
Christian economic ideals are subject to a 
large discount. They are regarded as a 
quaintly interesting but meaningless form. ^ 
The Church of Christ is to-day entering on 
the most tremendous battle of all its long his¬ 
tory. It has seen some hard fighting, against 
slavery, against liquor, but to-day, as in the 
first quarter of this century, it ranges itself 
against the evil of war and the injustices of 
the present social orders; it turns from a war 
against pygmies to a war against giants. That 
struggle will not be a puppet show but a Hun¬ 
dred Years^ War. That war will never be won 
by marionettes. It will be won only by men 
and women who have something of the spirit 
of the ^^Lone Dog’^ portrayed by Irene Mc¬ 
Leod: 

"I'm a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog and lone. 

I'm a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own. 

I’m a bad dog, a mad dog, teasing silly sheep. 

I love to sit and bay the moon to keep fat souls from 
sleep. 


136 


SKYLINES 




“ril never be a lap dog, licking dirty feet, 

A sleek dog, a meek dog, cringing for my meat. 

Not for me the fireside, the well-filled plate. 

But shut door and sharp stone and cuff and kick and 
hate. 

"Not for me the other dogs—running by my side. 
Some have run a short while, but none of them 
would bide. 

O, mine is still the lone trail, the hard trail, the best, 
Wild wind and wild stars and the hunger of the 
quest”* 


qjsed by permission of B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York City. 



XI 


WHAT ARE THE WILD WAVES SAYING? 

T N 1897 Marconi was asked how far a radio 
dispatch could be sent. ‘^Oh/’ he answered, 
‘^about twenty miles.’’ To-day radio telephone 
conversations are being conducted between 
New York and San Francisco. 

The new chapters in the wireless are being 
written so fast that it is unsafe to discuss it 
with any hope of being up to date unless your 
words are to be printed within the next five 
minutes. 

During the feverish days of the Great War 
a speaker declared, “Nothing is quite what it 
was a second ago.” Since that time we have 
learned with bitter disillusion that a number 
of things are exactly what they were five hun¬ 
dred years ago. Nevertheless, his remark 
would fit the vdreless. Were I to record the 
latest wireless progress on this page, by the 
time it is printed and published, it will read 
like comments on ancient history before the 

137 


138 


SKYLINES 


building of the Pyramids. Mr. Marconi, with 
a magic which shames Prospero, has conjured 
spirits out of the vasty deep. 

There is music in the air. Our ten-year-old 
children can make the very bedsprings become 
suddenly vocal with the melody of “Lohen¬ 
grin’’ and “Tannhauser.” We may expect 
that to-morrow the instruments regarded as 
marvels to-day will be as out of place and old- 
fashioned as quill pens, crinolines, and high¬ 
wheeled bicycles. Our morning walk to the 
street car may be livened up by clapping our 
vest-pocket receiver to our ear and hearing all 
about the trouble which the natives of Afghan¬ 
istan are causing 10 Downing Street The 
“horrors” of living on a farm will be distinctly 
lessened. When the Canadian woodchopper in 
Saskatchewan tires of chopping he can sit 
down on a log, take out his pocket i^adio ap¬ 
paratus and allow himself to be edified (if 
such a use of the word is justified) by the lat¬ 
est songs sung on Broadway. 

Every train will doubtless have its radio 
telephone. If the train is late, you can call 
up and inform your wife that you will not be 
home for dinner. 

Of course the present interest in the wireless 


THE WILD WAVES 


139 


telephone is that of a six-year-old boy intoxi¬ 
cated by the delirium of a new toy. When the 
novelty wears off, the possibilities of the wire¬ 
less can be more definitely appraised. The 
tones and overtones which are soaring through 
the air, however, have much to say to one who 
listens intently. The ethereal Babel running in 
criss-cross currents around the world is say¬ 
ing something important about the mind and 
the soul of man, as compared with this amaz¬ 
ing development of the work of his hands. 

It will pay us to ask ^What are the wild 
waves saying?’’—these ether waves which bear 
the whispers of the nations across the seas. 
Is the message going across this amazing 
means of communication at all comparable in 
its significance with the means itsielf? In 
other words, the wild waves are saying this: 
^^When the means of communication are abso¬ 
lutely perfected, will there be anyone left on 
earth who has anything to say?” 

We are making fairyland progress in the 
art of how to say things. Is the soul keeping 
up with the procession? Have we very much 
worth saying? It is not an idle question. What 
is the point of talking all the way from New 
York to Honolulu over the air if you have 


140 


SKYLINES 


nothing to say, except: ‘^Good morning! Have 
you used’’—a certain well-advertised soap? 
What exactly is gained for life of the mind 
and soul of the country if this wonderful 
means of carrying music is used about ninety 
per cent of the time in reproducing the clang¬ 
ing barbarities of a jazz band? If a voice is 
poor, it will be just as poor or poorer broad¬ 
casted to the ends of the earth, and the won¬ 
derful means of communication will only em¬ 
phasize the dullness and triviality if the mes¬ 
sage is dull and trivial. 

As we listen to a wireless it will symbolize 
for us one of the most significant and import¬ 
ant aspects of civilization to-day, namely, the 
disproportion between the mechanical de¬ 
velopment and the spiritual and intellectual 
advance. This is, of course, an old observa¬ 
tion. Thoreau made it very keenly when the 
first Atlantic cable was laid. He said, “It is 
wonderful, but probably the first news that 
comes over it will be that Princess Adelaide 
has the whooping cough.” 

The very inventions which come to man in 
the guise of aids to his mental and spiritual 
life become substitutes for it. The marvelous 
inventions which have added so much to the 


THE WILD WAVES 


141 


ease and range of human intercourse have 
been largely used as substitutes for it. That 
is, there were more messages intrinsically 
worth w^hile, more real communications ex¬ 
pressive of personality, before the advent of 
the telegraph, telephone, and omnipresent post 
card than since, with the many new aids to ex¬ 
pression. The undeniable fact remains that 
we do not write letters as our grand-parents 
did. Where in the country will you find a 
statesman or public man who writes letters 
with anything like the frequency, length, de¬ 
tail, and interest, which John Adams put into 
his letters to his wife during the most crowded 
and strenuous days of the Eevolution? And 
Adams was no isolated exception. All the pub¬ 
lic men of the period were voluminous letter- 
writers. To-day we feel ourselves fortunate to 
get a ^Wours received and contents noted’^ 
letter. 

Of course it is true that the newspaper to¬ 
day makes the old-fashioned letter-writing un¬ 
necessary. But while that is true, there was in 
the long letters of generations past a personal 
element, a communication of soul to soul, 
whose loss is a great one. We all remember 
from our high-school days the stately and pon- 


142 


SKYLINES 


derous march of Macaulay^s argument in his 
“Essay on Milton/’ that “as civilization ad¬ 
vances poetry invariably declines.” Our 
present thesis resembles it not a little: as the 
aids to living multiply, the life itself is in dan¬ 
ger of being crowded out by them. To say this 
is not to raise a futile cry, calling back a van¬ 
ished day. It is not to inveigh against the com¬ 
plexity of life, as Ruskin did against the rav¬ 
ages of the steam engine. But it is to recognize 
that every advance of the mechanical inven¬ 
tion puts upon the soul an immensely in¬ 
creased necessity of getting on top of its aids. 

This is one of the aspects in American life 
which Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson finds most 
striking. In his Appearances, he vividly de¬ 
scribes a night spent in a telegraph office on 
the Rocky Mountains. “I listened to the click¬ 
ing while the sleet fell faster and the evening 
begnn to close in. What messages were they, I 
wondered, that were passing across the moun¬ 
tains? I connected them idly enough vuth the 
corner in wheat a famous speculator was en¬ 
deavoring to establish in Chicago, and re¬ 
flected upon the disproportion between the 
achievements of man and the use to which he 
puts them. He invents the wireless telegraph 


THE WILD WAVES 


143 


and ships call to one another day and night to 
tell the name of the latest winner. He is in¬ 
venting the flying machine and will use it to 
advertise pills and drop bombs. And here he 
has exterminated the Indians and carried his 
lines and poles across the mountains that a 
gambler may All his pockets by starving a con¬ 
tinent. ^Click-click-click-pick-pick pock-pock- 
pockets.’ So the East called to the West and 
the West called to the East.” Such wonder¬ 
ful means to say things with —and so little to 
say! 

John Keats never had the treat of hearing a 
phonograph record conveyed by the wireless 
over five hundred miles, but he did once hear a 
nightingale, and it may be that there was more 
to be gained by listening to the nightingale’s 
song and preserving the beauty and inspira¬ 
tion of the moment in immortal verse than 
hearing the uninspired strains of mechanical 
music, even though it traveled twenty-five 
thousand miles. 

The same truth is even a little plainer in the 
realm of public thinking. What an incalcu¬ 
lable aid to widespread intelligence the news¬ 
paper is! Here are all the materials on which 
to base judgments, all the evidences to be 


144 


SKYLINES 


weighed—a mass of thought-provoking in¬ 
formation absolutely undreamt of by our fath¬ 
ers. Will anyone dare to say that we have a 
corresponding increase in thinking? The in¬ 
vestigators, the pyschologists, and the whole 
corps of experts—and near-experts—who have 
been making a survey of the national mind do 
not furnish us any grounds for bringing in a 
very flattering report on the mental age of 
America. The man with the mirror is abroad 
in the land. We do not refer to the individual 
who is dusting off the mantle-pieces of Down¬ 
ing Street or the stained-glass windows of 
British churches, but to the people who are 
revealing our mental secrets. They tell us that 
the public has a nine-year-old mind, and we 
are tempted to think at times that they are 
grossly flattering said public. 

Many citizens of our broad land have grown 
so accustomed to cartoons that they are un¬ 
able to assimilate information through any 
other means. One of the most successful ven¬ 
tures in the newspaper world in recent years 
is that of the newspaper designed on the 
theory that a large section of the public likes 
to have its daily news served up in kindergar¬ 
ten fashion. Fifty words is about the limit of 


THE WILD WAVES 


145 


an article. The article rarely discusses any¬ 
thing more profound than the current scandal 
at Hollywood and yesterday’s hold-ups, va¬ 
ried with the pictures of the winners of the lat¬ 
est beauty contest or favorites at the beach. 
Thus we see the ironical triumph of the amaz¬ 
ing teciinical miracle of the Hoe press—it ob¬ 
literates in the minds of hundreds of thou¬ 
sands of people any capacity for thinking at 
all! 

The aid to thinking has become the substi¬ 
tute for the real thing. If we were one of 
those pestilent people who flatter themselves 
on their frankness, when some of our best 
friends began a sentence with ‘^I think,” we 
would interrupt with, ^^My dear sir, you ex¬ 
aggerate, you do nothing of the kind.” 

There is an automobile story about a man 
who eagerly desired to purchase a number of 
accessories for his car. But the only way he 
could raise the money to do it with was to 
sell the car itself and buy the accessories. So 
that is what he did. That is what the wild 
waves are telling us, that we are in danger of 
allowing the accessories of life to usurp the 
place of life itself. Just test out the truth of 
this statement in regard to the realm which 


146 


SKYLINES 


all of us know best—the home. Has not the 
external aid become in many cases the sub¬ 
stitute for that inner life, which the word 
^^home’’ in its highest sense really means? The 
perfect arrangement of kitchen, the hundred 
minor conveniences, the pianola, the automo¬ 
bile—what a picture they make beside the 
kitchen and house of other days, where every¬ 
thing visible spelled hard and continuous 
labor! Yet who would exchange the inner life 
of that average home of three generations 
ago for that of its modern descendant? No, 
we are all willing to confess that electric 
irons and hardwood floors and vacuum clean¬ 
ers are poor substitutes for unfeigned love and 
family prayers. 

Many have been speculating as to the place 
the radio telephone will play as a rival to the 
church. When one can stay at home and in 
the comfort of the front porch or even in bed, 
have the music and the sermon—in fact, every¬ 
thing except the collection—brought to his 
bedside, there may be smaller incentive to get 
up. There is also the fact to be reckoned with 
that by staying home we can hear that elo¬ 
quent Demosthenes, Dr. Henry Ward Beecher 
Brooks, instead of being dependent on the 



THE WILD WAVES 


147 


prose of the Kev. Mr. Fifthly, the pastor of the 
church nearest us. But those who have fol¬ 
lowed the fortunes of preaching through the 
ages are not greatly wrought up with fears 
over the competition between the reproduction 
of a voice by an instrument and the presence 
face to face of a living prophet in the act of 
delivering his message. 

But there is and ever will be a keen rivalry 
in a more vital sense between the church and 
the thing that the radio stands for—^^that is, 
between the life of the soul and those scientific 
and mechanical achievements which ought to 
be the slaves and not the usurpers of the spirit. 
There will be a fight always between the means 
of living and the life itself, for it is just as 
true to-day as it was when Jesus first formu¬ 
lated the truth that ‘^Life is more than meat 
and the body than raiment.^’ 


XII 


GAMES FOR GROWN-UPS 

T his is not a treatise on golf. Nor chess. 

Golf requires a bank account. Chess de¬ 
mands brains. I have neither. Nor do I dare 
give pointers on tennis, dearly as I would love 
to, while my serve languishes in its present 
state of infantile paralysis. Nevertheless, 
though an incurable dub in every sport known 
to man, I tune my lyre to chant a hymn of 
praise to ^‘games for grown-ups.’’ 

Games for children take care of themselves 
in spite of any repression and neglect. They 
spring up as irresistibly as grass. But grown¬ 
ups need a guardian. Else they forget how to 
play, and by so much, how to live. do 

not stop playing because we grow old; we 
grow old because we stop playing.” 

Middle-agers (we refer to a person’s toll of 
years, not to a well-known period of history, 
although, come to think of it, there is some 
connection between the two) frequently mut- 

148 


GAMES FOR GROWN-UPS 


149 


ter something about ^^the years that bring the 
philosophic mind as an excuse for not playing 
games.’’ Philosophic mind, bosh! What most 
of us have is not the philosophic mind but the 
rheumatism! A game is a life preserver. It is 
a breaker of evil charms. When a man has 
the nightmare and dreams that the house is 
falling down on him, it is a great service to 
wake him up. That is exactly what a good 
game does. When a man conceives of himself 
as a victim of fate, with the bottom of the uni¬ 
verse falling out, a good fast game restores 
him to what in these days would be called 
^^normalcy.” It brings back an ability to see 
things in their right proportions. Also when 
a man is suffering from another kind of night¬ 
mare, when he dreams in his waking moments 
that he is Napoleon, or the Pope, or Henry 
Ford, playing in a good game gently brings 
him back to realities. Playing is the only real 
cure for that strange affliction which descends 
on humans in which they regard themselves as 
Important Personages. The game is the kind 
nurse which brings us out of that delirium. 
Also for grown-ups a good game is the nearest 
of anything to the fine art—the priceless art 
which Browning ascribes to the thrush which 


150 


SKYLINES 


. sings each song twice over, 

Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture.” 

A mistake almost equally tragic to that of 
not playing at all, is to spend one’s time in 
playing games that are not worth the candle. 
Bridge-whist is usually assault and battery 
committed on time with intent to kill. Gam¬ 
bling is not a cure for anything, but a disease 
in itself. 

The best games are those that we learn first 
—children’s games—carried over into adult 
years with the same zest, but with a little 
change in the rules and the objects and the 
scale on which they are played. 

I 

It is a capital blunder to forget how to play 
spy !’’—that king of outdoor sports. Spell 
it as you wish, either “eye spy” or “I spy”; it 
is just as much fun either way. You play it 
with your eyes and heart principally; your 
feet come in unconsciously and incidentally. 
Who can ever forget the days of real sport, the 
eager eyes searching for hidden playmates; 
the startled discovery, the frantic run? It 
was a great thing to spy someone around the 


GAMES FOE GROWN-UPS 


151 


corner of the barn or under the porch. It is a 
game one should keep on playing until he 
i*eaches ninety-five. There is nothing in life 
which is more fun than really to see some¬ 
thing for yourself, to discover something with 
your own eyes. 

One of the most famous games of spy^’ 
ever played was that played by Archimedes. 
The beauty of the game is that you can play it 
anywhere. Archimedes was playing it in the 
bathtub, and he actually spied something, not, 
as the young school boy insisted, the soap, but 
the law of specific gravity. He rushed down 
the street in the exhilaration of the game cry¬ 
ing, ^^Eurekal’’ and made a permanent dent 
not only on the Greek language but on all the 
languages of the earth. For the first time in 
all history he saw something hitherto con¬ 
cealed—a great law of the universe. 

So much of the time we go through life with 
blinkers on, stumbling down the street in a 
kind of ^^Blindman’s buff,” in which we rarely 
actually see anything clearly. William James 
tells us that the infant’s first mental operation 
is the observation, ^^Thingumbob again”— 
which is about as accurate a mental picture as 
we usually form. 


152 


SKYLINES 


The long gleaming history of discovery and 
invention is just a game of spy/’ The keen 
eye gives the thrill of actually finding and 
seeing something. Columbus played it on an 
epic scale in his venturesome pilgrimage across 
the Atlantic, pushing on until he stubbed his 
toe on America and accidentally bumped into 
a continent. What a game it was! 

“Then pale and worn, he paced his deck, 

And peered through darkness. Ah, that night 
Of all dark nights! And then a speck— 

A light! A light! A light! A light! 

“It grew, a starlight flag unfurled! 

It grew to be Time’s burst of dawn. 

He gained a world; he gave that world 
Its grandest lesson: On! sail on!” 

And the game went on for two centuries with ' 
Hudson, LaSalle, Marquette, Lewis and Clark 
scampering all over the great playgiwnds of 
North America. 

It is just as fine a game in science. Benja¬ 
min Franklin had great sport playing it. It is 
commonly reported that on a certain memor¬ 
able stormy night he was out after the curfew 
had rung flying a kite. Doubtless he was, but 
the kite was only an accessory. He was really 
playing spy” with the heavens and discov- 


GAMES FOR GROWN-UPS 


153 


ered a spark. It can be played with the same 
exhilarating results with a microscope. Pas¬ 
teur played it, and discovered a microbe, and 
ever since the deadly microbe has been trailed 
to his lair by hunters who have made of the 
chase a far more heroic adventure than anyone 
ever put into the stalking of a Bengal tiger. 

Religion in its highest moments is a thrill¬ 
ing game of spy.’^ Abraham played it as 
he walked west with God and looked up into 
the sky and saw there a star, then another star, 
until there became thousands of stars and in 
each he saw a pledge of the on-going purposes 
and constancy of a God who would not allow 
his will to be baffled. The wonder of religious 
experience has been the thrill of faith which 
has taken hold of men as they have looked out 
on heaven and earth and cried, spy”— 

see God in human events, here and now.” It 
runs all through the Bible. The Wise Men 
played it—^^And when they saw the star they 
rejoiced with exceeding great joy.” That old 
Hebrew psalmist played it when he declared 
had fainted unless I believed to see the 
goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” 

The man of faith looks out on a dark scene 
to-day and amidst the inky blackness sees 


154 


SKYLINES 


streaks of dawn. His social outlook is lit up 
with the old-time faith of John, who looked 
out on just as black a scene and reported, 
John, saw the Holy City coming down out of 
heaven.” 

These ai^ great days in which to play “I 
spy,” with the evidences of God^s purposes and 
presence in the world. For they are days in 
which nothing else wdll suffice to put a lasting 
zest into life. 

Perhaps the keenest relish comes when we 
play spy” with people; when our powers of 
observation are sufficiently sharpened by faith 
and sympathy to discover in the people we 
meet the things in them which the world has 
passed over without recognizing them; when 
we detect in human character the beauties and 
powers covered up. It is only so that we be¬ 
come experts in the art of life. 

Think of the high zest with which Jesus must 
have cried ^‘I spy” when he caught a glimpse 
of Matthew in his office and reached out his 
arresting hands to commandeer the abilities 
of Matthew for the purposes of the Kingdom. 
It took more than a tree to hide Zacchaeus 
from the keen eyes of that Best Seeker. 

This seeking for undetected wealth of per- 


GAMES FOR GROWN-UPS 


155 


sonality is a far more interesting game than 
the sleep-walking in which we engage many of 
our waking hours. 

Most of life’s minor, and even major, trage¬ 
dies come from the fact that frequently we 
never really see the people that we know best 
and live with. The great undei^taking of 
Christian discipleship is just to discover and 
bring out the powers which God has locked up 
in people. A bungler may hold a yellow photo¬ 
graphic plate in the developing room and say, 
^^Why bother with this? It is only a piece of 
yellow glass. There is nothing in it.” But the 
expert takes it and holds it in the developing 
fluid and demonstrates that there is a great 
deal in it. There are high lights and deep 
shadows in it. And as he holds it sympatheti¬ 
cally under the right conditions he brings 
beautv out of it. That is the whole art of 
Christian nurture and the unfailing lure of 
this game for grown-ups. 

There are just two rules to remember. First, 
you cannot play it on stilts. Imagine trying 
to play ^^I spy” on stilts. You would never 
get near enough to a live, scampering young¬ 
ster to see him, let alone catch him. The peo¬ 
ple who go about on stilts pay an awful price 


156 


SKYLINES 


for their elevation. You will never see very 
much propped up on complacent self-satisfac¬ 
tion and conceit. You will never make very 
many discoveries if in your human contacts 
you always have to lean over with an ^^Oh,-did- 
the-Lord-make-you-too?” type of patronage. 
Certain games such as billiards and croquet 
require a horizontal surface. So does this 
game of discovering people. 

You cannot play it in front of a mirror. 
Naturally, if you stand in front of a mirror, 
you will never see much worth looking at. A 
person who has traveled a thousand miles to 
see Niagara Falls and then stands on Lookout 
Point gazing at himself in a mirror would be a 
fit candidate for a home for the feeble-minded. 
Yet that is exactly the attitude which a great 
many people take when set down in front of 
the wonders of life and personality. 

II 

What would the church social of the last 
fifty years have been without the game of 
^^Stagecoach’’? It is as impossible to think of 
as to think of Switzerland without the Alps. 
For the benefit of the Eskimos and New Zea- 


GAMES FOR GROWN-UPS 


157 


landers who may read these pages it may be ex¬ 
plained that the game of stagecoach is played 
by people sitting in a circle, and as the magic 
word ‘‘stagecoach’^ is pronounced, they get up 
and change seats with someone else. You con¬ 
tinually put yourself in the place of another 
fellow, and that of course is the most refresh¬ 
ing trick in the world—to flop down for a 
minute in someone’s else chair and to look out 
on the world from his point of view. When 
such an experience is made into a definite 
habit of life, it is a veritable cruise to the 
Fountain of Youth. 

There is a great deal of difference between a 
tractor and a trolley car. A trolley car must 
spend its humdrum days running back and 
forth over the same tracks, but an ungainly 
little caterpillar tractor can roam across the 
fields and cut corners at will. If it decides to 
go in for ditches, it can go in for ditches; like¬ 
wise hills, alleys, or front lawns. “Afoot and 
light-hearted it takes to the open road.” We 
have always thought that there would be a lot 
more fun in being a tractor than a trolley. 
Thousands of people prove it every day. There 
are people who have the same freedom of 
motion and direction in their thinking which 


158 


SKYLINES 


a caterpillar tractor has. And there are, alas, 
uncounted myriads who, like the trolley car, 
go over the same little track back and forth, 
forth and back until the tracks wear thin and 
the power dies down. 

The art of j)laying stagecoach is the art of 
sitting down in the other fellow’s chair and 
taking a squint at life as it looks to him. It is 
the art of getting off your beat and mating a 
wild excursion into the next block. 

It can be played in all sorts of ways. There 
is lots of fun and a deal of value in getting 
into a new part of the city where you have 
never been before. You come down to your 
office, get off at the same comer, walk by the 
same fireplug, out to the same one-armed 
restaurant as though the chief of police had 
assigned you to that beat. If you live on 
Grand Boulevard, jump the track some time 
and try Hogan’s Alley. You will learn a lot. 
Explore a new part of the day. If you always 
go into tovm on the 8:15, set the alarm clock 
and catch the 7:05 some morning. You will 
think you are in a new world. You will get in 
with people who have different kinds of jobs 
and who wear different clothes. Again the 
thrilling possibility of learning something! 


GAMES FOR GROWN-UPS 


159 


Why not play stagecoach in your reading? 
If you are accustomed to reading a solid con¬ 
servative morning newspaper (if there be any 
such), try the Hearst papers some morning 
and learn what is being served up for the nine- 
year-old mind. If you feast your soul with 
The Christian Advocate or the Woman^s Mis¬ 
sionary Friend at regular intervals, look over 
the menu on the corner news-stand and try 
The Nation for dessert or The New York Gall. 
Get The Crisis —see what the radical Negro is 
thinking about. And vice versa. That is the 
real beauty of this game—the vice versa! 

The man who never plays stagecoach is a 
menace to the nation. He sees only one point 
of view. There are large sections of the pub¬ 
lic who can go through a critical industrial 
strike in their neighborhood without ever un¬ 
derstanding in the least, even roughly, what 
the whole thing is about. It has never crossed 
their minds that there is such a thing as any 
other side than the one served up by their 
daily paper. 

There is an old song about ^^the bear that 
went over the mountain.’’ The second verse, 
which records the fact that the other side of 
the mountain was all he could see, was com- 



160 


SKYLINES 


monly supposed to be an anti-climax, the in¬ 
ference being that he did not see very much 
after all. The fact is that the bear performed 
an unusual and extraordinary stunt. He saw 
a lot more than most of us ever see. Actually 
to go over a mountain and see the other side 
is one of the biggest things anyone can ever do. 
The only hope of the future is that there shall 
be an increasing number of people who are 
willing to try and find out what other groups 
are thinking about, willing to try to under¬ 
stand all viewpoints, and especially to see 
clearly the human values in any industrial 
situation. The worst enemy of America is not 
the long-haired dynamiter with a bomb. That 
individual lives principally in the cartoons 
and over-heated official imaginations. The 
worst enemy of America is the thoughtless re¬ 
actionary to whom the mountain has only one 
side. 


Ill 

Another children's game which ought to 
carry over into the forties and all points be¬ 
yond is the game of ‘follow the Leader.” 
Nearly every one of us carries a sharp memory 
of barked shins and bumped heads which came 


GAMES FOE GROWN-UPS 


161 


to us in the course of this game of “Follow the 
Leader.” 

It is essentially a game of youth, and always 
will be; a game for youngsters who do not 
have sense enough to know what they cannot 
do and when they are beaten. It is the game 
to which Jesus called his disciples when he 
said, “Follow me.” 

We would get a much clearer focus on the 
whole apostolic situation if we thought of 
them more often as a bunch of youngsters. 

The Primary Picture Cluster which used 
to adorn the walls of the Infant Department 
of the Sunday school with its indigo blue and 
flaming vermilion colors has slandered the 
apostles outrageously. That fiery Son of 
Thunder, John, always appeared with long, 
flowing whiskers which would have done 
credit to Walt Whitman. We have uncon¬ 
sciously come to think of the disciples as a 
body of men resembling the venerable patri¬ 
archs of the United States Senate. 

An idea of Christianity based on such art is 
fundamentally wrong. It is a great mistake 
to confuse the apostles with the Senate. The 
chief business of the Senate is to keep the lid 
on; the apostles pried it open. The slackening 


162 


SKYLINES 




energies of old men are usually employed in 
preserving things as they are. But the 
exuberant powers of these young*sters whom 
Jesus called to follow him were trying to make 
things as they ought to be. The fact that the 
disciples were early called ^^those who came 
to turn the world upside down,” testifies that 
in spite of minor mistakes they got the main 
idea of Jesus. His invitation is still issued to 
join him in the great game of ‘^Follow the 
Leader” in turning a world that is upside- 
down right side up! 


I 


XIII 


FINISHING SCHOOLS 
HE little girl across the street went away 



last fall to a Finishing School. The trip 
was altogether a success. She was “finished.’^ 
The preceptress and all the other ^^esses” ac¬ 
complished the task with all the neatness and 
dispatch promised in the catalog. Of the effi¬ 
ciency of the curriculum there can be no 
doubt. The finished product has reminded us 
that the tender grace of a day that is dead will 
never come back again. And I, for one, felt 
almost as though a funeral had passed down 
our block, for the light of a whole block dies 
when one of its little girls disappears in the 
clutches of a finishing school. 

Oh yes, Mildred is still with us. Not all the 
finishing touches have been entirely completed. 
Little girls are endowed by the Creator with 
certain inalienable rights, and not even the 
most expensive finishing school in the country 
can quite alienate them. She is still pretty. 
In some sophisticated ways much more so 


163 


164 


SKYLINES 


than before. She has what is described in the 
catalog as ^‘carriage.” But the frank, rollick¬ 
ing playmate-at-large of the whole neighbor¬ 
hood, with her honest, inquisitive eyes, with 
her unconscious and yet fierce democracy, and 
her sublime (I had almost written divine) in¬ 
dependence of judgment, is gone. In her place 
there is a finished product, with imagination, 
emotions, and most other faculties so stiff that 
they walk with a limp. 

A schoolboy, showing a picture of King 
Charles I on his way to the scaffold, told the 
astonished onlookers that it was a picture of 
King Charles on his way to be block-headed. 
That sometimes happens at school. And it is 
a question whether it is not as bad a tragedy 
in one’s life to be block-headed as be-headed. 

If I wei’^ to draw a picture of the type of 
finishing school to which Mildred went, it 
would be the open mouth of a dark cave with 
a long string of little girls in pig-tails going 
into it on their way to be block-headed. 

Whoever gave this particular type of in¬ 
stitution the name of finishing school had a 
flash of genius. There is a kind of expensive 
school that is like a garden in which the little 
dwarf Japanese trees are raised, or rather, 


FINISHING SCHOOLS 


165 


where they are stunted. Every variety of re¬ 
tarding process known is ingeniously applied. 
The native efflorescence of the plant is dead¬ 
ened until the ‘fflnished’’ tree, a few feet in 
height, while it is graceful and beautiful after 
a hothouse fashion, is nothing more than a 
caricature of a tree. 

These schools do not supply the discipline 
or the training which would fit a woman for 
the modern world of self-respecting freedom 
and enlarged opportunity. They do not fit 
her to move in self-reliant and effective service 
in the world to-day. They rather fit her to 
take her part in one of the Elsie Dinsmore 
books, or one of the novels by ^ffhe Duchess’^ 
so popular a generation ago. They teach a 
little French, enough to enable one to order a 
table d’hote dinner, but not enough to strug¬ 
gle with the mysteries of an d la carte menu. 
They teach some music—enough to enable the 
student to change the phonograph records 
gracefully. And they teach deportment. 
Heavens, what a word! The self-conscious at¬ 
tention to “the proprieties’^ acts on the human 
soul like a chilling breeze on a peach orchard 
just bursting into blossom and nips all the 
blooms in the bud. The ill-fated graduates of 



166 


SKYLINES 


a fashionable finishing school might well take 
as their class motto, ‘^We have met the enemy 
and we are theirs/^ For their natural human 
sympathies and the possibilities of their ex¬ 
panding spirits have been smothered by that 
deadly enemy of the human race—Superficial 
Convention. 

They have become self-centered and self- 
satisfied. Their vision is astigmatized until 
Paul Poiret is a greater man than Abraham 
Lincoln, and bridge-whist is a more vital issue 
than child labor. Oh, events will happen after 
they are ^^finished’’—events such as marriage, 
births and death. But the history of a grow¬ 
ing soul is pretty largely closed. The candle 
has been snuffed out. 

But there are many other kinds of finishing 
schools. Marriage has proved a deadly finish¬ 
ing school for the larger powers of human 
spirit to many millions of women. This is not 
necessarily a fault of the institution of mar¬ 
riage itself. It is the woman who is the usual 
victim of the inertia which develops often 
after marriage. 

When the bride steps within her own four 
walls the shades of the prison house descend 
upon her. Indeed, we might often better 




FINISHING SCHOOLS 


167 


read the Burial Service instead of the Wed¬ 
ding Kitual, for many of the finest possibili¬ 
ties of the mind are laid away. The interests 
of a woman’s life shrink until they are 
bounded by the circle of her neighbors and her 
house and her family. These are harsh words. 
Perchance you do not believe them. Then talk 
to the next minister you meet. Get him to 
tell you of the vast number of matrimonial 
craft which have disappeared beyond the van¬ 
ishing point as far as any vital, human service 
is concerned after marriage. 

Here is a bright young girl interested in 
many kinds of work, both religious and phil¬ 
anthropic. Often she makes the capital 
blunder of dropping them all after marriage 
and retires from the busy world’s human need 
as though she were either a nun who had en¬ 
tered a convent, or a fat little hedgehog which 
had wiggled itself into its dug-out for the 
winter. The person who thus takes the line 
of least resistance, and in the self-satisfied 
happiness of the early days and years of mar¬ 
ried life withdraws from the wider circle of 
service and fellowship, will pay a heavy price 
for it in the dullness and emptiness of later 
years, 


168 


SKYLINES 


Many other things act as finishing schools 
in much the same manner. A little bit of suc¬ 
cess early in the game may be a finishing 
school for anyone so unlucky as to encounter 
it. A man^s real possibilities of growth and 
development may be entirely spoiled by the 
easy mastery of the first lessons of a profes¬ 
sion or art. Whenever a person says, ever so 
slyly and softly to himself, have learned 
the trick,” his feet stand in slippery places. 
We often use the phrase regarding a certain 
person, ^^He has arrived.” That phrase in it¬ 
self is an epitaph, for the man who has ^^ar- 
rived” is usually so conscious of the feat that 
he stops to admire himself, and at that hour 
his faculties congeal. 

There was an actor in the old days who 
played the part of a butler so perfectly that 
every critic singled out his performance for 
favorable mention. The praise so went to his 
head that he played the butler^s part all his 
life. 

When a singer has listened to enough peo¬ 
ple telling him that he is a wonder, he is in 
imminent danger of coming to believe it, and 
when that happens there is only one step 
more, namely, the exit. More preachers have 


FINISHING SCHOOLS 


169 


been ruined by thoughtless old ladies in their 
congTegations, who play the part of the very 
devil, tempting the poor fellows to the dizzy 
heights of self-conceit, than by all other causes 
put together. Unconsciously, unless he is a 
man either of iron will or genuine Christian 
humility, he surveys his weekly sermonic ef¬ 
fort with the air of a Nebuchadnezzar who 
says, ^^Is not this great Babylon which I have 
built?’’ The inevitable sequel always hap¬ 
pens. Like the great Nebuchadnezzar, he is 
soon turned out to pasture! 

Pity the poor man who has one good sermon. 
It will be the death of him as a preacher, un¬ 
less a providential fire comes along and bums 
it up, or some other interposition of Provi¬ 
dence snatches him from the jaws of death. 
Many a man owes his power as a preacher to 
the fact that he was condemned to preach for 
years to audiences which, in true scriptural 
fashion, were steadfast and immovable. Try¬ 
ing to move them was like trying to lift the 
Rocky Mountains. The poor man strained on 
in the labors of Hercules for years, until, by 
the grace of God, he acquired the power of 
speaking words so straight and plain and 
warm that they would melt the very rocks. 


170 


SKYLINES 


It must be laid up to the eternal credit of 
many a solid headed congregation that it has 
helped to make real preachers by strengthen¬ 
ing in them that humility of spirit which is 
the only path to power. 

Ingrowing professionalism' is an ideal fin¬ 
ishing school. The narrow interests, stereo¬ 
typed manner, the class consciousness, the 
machine-like mental reactions—all combine to 
stifie the native individual flavor of personal¬ 
ity. It is a common biological process for a 
man’s position to harden on him like a shell. 

When this goes on unhindered for several 
years the man is as much cased in from the 
outer world as a hermit crab. The physician, 
the business executive, the teacher and the 
preacher all stand in the way of temptation. 

We are very familiar with the name ^^hard- 
shelled Baptist.” But the Baptists have no 
monopoly on hard shells. The family of 
crustaceans is very democratic. There are 
^^hard-shelled” Episcopalians and ‘^hard- 
shelled” Methodists and Presbyterians— 
clergymen whom their profession has solidi¬ 
fied. The Monday-morning Preachers’ Meet¬ 
ing has proved a finishing school for many a 
minister. It is a serious question whether the 


FINISHING SCHOOLS 


171 


Preachers’ Meeting ought not to be listed in 
the Methodist Discipline in the paragraph on 
^‘Forbidden Amusements.” The dangerous 
part of the curriculum is not in the meeting 
itself, which occasionally provides addresses 
of a stimulating order. The danger spot 
is the bookstore, where the brethren gather 
for the weekly orgy of ecclesiastical gos¬ 
sip. Let us be fair. There is a fellow¬ 
ship value to these gatherings which is 
large. The Monday-morning meeting is the 
pious equivalent for the ‘^Hail, hail, the gang’s 
all here” of other circles, and as such ought to 
be encouraged. The finishing school comes in 
the professional consciousness which is pro¬ 
moted by the petty whirlpools and eddies of a 
back-water far removed from the main 
streams of life. A cramping professionalism 
closes in on one when the small game of eccle¬ 
siastical politics looms larger and larger. 

To many preachers the question of Saint 
Paul in Galatians is very applicable: ^‘You 
were running well, what did hinder you?” 
What slows down so many ministers at middle 
age? When a runner slackens in the second 
lap of the race the trouble is usually simple— 
he gets out of breath. The preacher has the 



172 


SKYLINES 


same trouble—scanty inspiration. His atten¬ 
tion gets deflected to tbe minor details and ac¬ 
cidents of bis work. Larger enthusiasms are 
swallowed up by petty annoyances. 

An item in the newspapers a few days ago 
recorded the fact that a Boston built clipper 
ship of the sixties named ^^The Glory of the 
Seas” (what a hilarious name for a trim little 
clipper!) was condemned to the junk heap. 
^‘The Glory of the Seas” was one of the first 
square-rigged vessels afloat in her day, and it 
was a sad sight to see her towed away to the 
junk heap. But that event described the anti¬ 
climax that often happens in life when a man 
whose passion and freshness might well be 
termed ‘^the glory of the seas” pulls into some 
inglorious drydock of a lack-luster routine. 

A recent comic film showed the village fire 
department called out to extinguish a fire. 
They fell to wrangling over the precedence 
and rank of the various members, which one 
should have the honor of attaching the hose 
and which would hold the nozzle. The dispute 
lasted until the house completely burned 
down. It was uproariously funny on the 
screen, but not so funny in real life, where 
men whose ostensible business it is to save 



FINISHING SCHOOLS 


173 


civilization allow their energies to be absorbed 
in the details of wrangling for precedence. 

One of the most fatal features of the pro¬ 
fessional manner is the subtlety of the process 
by which a narrow provincialism becomes the 
chief, or at least one, of the major ends of life. 
The result is either a gently complaining dis¬ 
position or a complacency which is not easily 
stirred. It is this professionalism which is 
largely responsible for the ungenerous jeal¬ 
ousy so often noticed among ministers. Or- 
this finishing school results in a mechanical 
routine. The prophet no longer gives to men 
battle cries and banners. Instead he admin¬ 
isters opiates and anodynes. 

There is in the Methodist phraseology a 
spiritual phrase which ought not to be lost, 
and that is a ^Hmveling ministry If there is 
any profession which ought to be a traveling 
one, it is the ministry. It must travel to keep 
step with the onward pilgrimage of the human 
race. The old physical itinerating may be¬ 
come largely a memory, but when the minister 
ceases to travel with intellectual agility, he 
surrenders his largest usefulness. A colored 
minister in the South greatly impressed his 
hearers once with a sermon in which he used 


174 


SKYLINES 


again and again the phrase statu quo. After 
the sermon was over one of the elders took 
him aside and said, ^Tarson, you kept saying 
lots of times that we were in a statu quo. 
What does that mean?” ‘Well, I will tell 
you,” the preacher answered. “It is Latin and 
it means in English, ‘we are in the devil of a 
fix.’ ” He translated well. It is a terrible fix 
to be in statu quo where everything is settled. 
Many a man imagines that he has settled the 
great questions which used to perplex him, 
when, as a matter of fact, he has only forgot¬ 
ten them. Ruskin says: “Whenever the 
search after Truth begins, there life begins. 
Whenever that search ceases, there life ceases.” 
A tragedy has happened in any man’s life when 
he loses that eager interest in intellectual life 
which Mr. Chesterton has characterized as 
“uproarious thinking.” 

Consider some of the most common courses 
at this finishing school for prophets. They 
may be briefly pointed out and a red lantern 
hung on them. A frequent and effective one is 
Ecclesiastical English. This is what is known 
in pious phraseology as the “Language of 
Zion.” Unless a minister watches his speech 
with eternal vigilance, it becomes interlarded 


FINISHING SCHOOLS 


175 


with pious phrases never used elsewhere, and 
which stamp him as belonging to a class apart 
from the common variety of the human race. 

Turn to any district superintendent’s report 
delivered at the Annual Conference to find an 
anthology of these threadbare ecclesiastical 
phrases. No orthodox district superintendent 
would think of closing a report without men¬ 
tioning going in the tops of the mulberry 
trees,” or referring to a ^^gracious revival,” 
and adding as an afterthought that ‘^the end 
is not yet.” 

Tone production is another course at the 
finishing school, by which a human voice be¬ 
comes an instrument for emitting sounds like 
that of a train caller at the Union Station. A 
minister ought to perform the highly useful 
function of a fog horn, warning people of im¬ 
pending dangers. But it is not strictly neces¬ 
sary to reproduce the tones of the fog horn 
itself. 

The worst trouble with what is known as a 
pulpit tone is that the afflicted is rarely con¬ 
scious of it. We once listened to a professor 
in a theological seminary warning the stu¬ 
dents against using a pulpit tone. The warn¬ 
ing itself was vocalized in what seemed to us 


176 


SKYLINES 


as the most sepulchral noises which ever burst 
forth from a human chest. A man has reached 
a sorry pass when he cannot speak in public 
without a trace of the ^det-us-all-rise-and-sing- 
that-grand-old-hymn’’ manner of speech. 

Happily, the ponderous pulpit orator is be¬ 
ing gathered to the historical museum. We do 
not hear that painful phrase, ^^pulpit effort,” 
as often as we used to. The preachers whom 
the country listens to wuth the greatest eager¬ 
ness are men who have mastered the art of 
simple Saxon speech without the slightest 
trace of conscious effort at impressiveness, 
men like Bishop P. J. McConnell, Henry 
Sloane Coffin, Charles R. Brown, and Charles 
E. Jefferson, to name only a few out of a large 
number. 

There is only one really effective precaution 
against suffocation—keep out in the open air. 


XIV 


THE ADVERTISING MAN TALKS 

H e was the only other occupant of the 
Pullman and the conversation, starting 
from, What’s your line?” that universal 
point of departure, had taken its rambling 
and leisurely way till it had reached the Ely- 
sian Fields of real intimacy. To my reply 
that I was a preacher he had told me that that 
was his business, too, and we shook hands 
again. 

^‘What denomination?” I had asked. 
^^Advertising,” he replied, without a smile. 
From that moment I knew he had some¬ 
thing to say and I kept diligently angling for 
it. But w e had covered quite a wide circle of 
territory, the ethics of advertising and much 
more, before a chance remark of mine, to the 
effect that I thought that the preachers had 
learned much from modem advertising, unex¬ 
pectedly proved to be the “Open Sesame” to 
his heart. 

“Yes, you have,” he readily agreed. “I’ve 

177 


178 


SKYLINES 


been a church-goer all my life, and it feels 
mighty good when I get into a town on Satur¬ 
day and pick up the papers and find that the 
church has really got a place in the sun. I 
have seen some very good ^adhesive’ sermons 
on church bulletin boards, too, the kind that 
stick to a man, and yet I’ve often wondered 
whether a good many preachers have really 
learned the biggest thing that modern adver¬ 
tising has got for them. For the most import¬ 
ant point of contact between the advertising 
man and the preacher is not in ingenious de¬ 
vices for drawing an audience; it has to do 
with the sermon itself. 

^^You see, I am one of those hopeless old 
fogies who believe that preaching is the preach¬ 
er’s chief job. Do you remember that old 
poem of Emerson’s where the Days hold out 
to a man a lot of gifts—kingdoms and all sorts 
of things—and he takes only a couple of apples 
and something else to eat and lets them go 
by? I am not a literary shark, but I use Emer¬ 
son in my business. He would have made a 
great ad writer—short crisp sentences with a 
bite in them. Well, I am afraid there are some 
preachers, with the best intentions in the 
world, who are taking from advertising only a 


ADVERTISING MAN TALKS 179 


few little things for immediate use, like the 
man in the poem, and letting what you might 
really call a whole kingdom of influence slip 
by without paying much attention to it. 

‘^George Batten says that the purpose of an 
advertisement is to get itself believed, remem¬ 
bered, and acted upon. I don’t know that you 
could get a better statement of what you are 
aiming at in the pulpit every Sunday; could 
you? I have spent a good many years writ¬ 
ing advertisements six days a week and listen¬ 
ing to sermons on Sunday, and all the time I 
have grown in the belief that the points of a 
good advertisement and of a good sermon are 
just about the same. The experiences that 
have taught me the little I know have been 
costly and humiliating; humiliating, because 
the things so obvious and elementary that they 
were right in front of my eyes have been the 
very things that I have taken a long time to 
see. But I guess the blunder is not so uncom¬ 
mon after all. 

“Take the most elementary thing of all, for 
instance, the fact that to secure effective pub¬ 
licity for anything you have actually got to 
study the article. Why, that’s an axiom! 
Everyone knows it in an unthinking sort of 


180 


SKYLINES 


way, but there are many advertising experts 
who do not believe it any more than I did 
when I began. I began to write advertise¬ 
ments with a knack for phrases, a ^nose for the 
unusual,^ and more or less superficial clever¬ 
ness that really got quite surprising results 
for such meager capital, but, fortunately, I 
fell into many a ditch quite early from the 
simple fact that, while talking quite interest¬ 
ingly in print, I did not really know all the 
ins and outs of the thing I was talking about. 
Irvin Cobb says it is one of the ^mysteries^ of 
the writing business that to make the deepest 
impression on your reader you must know 
what you are writing about. Some clever and 
superficial work may pass the test, but sooner 
or later the man who knows little about paints 
or painting but who tries to write ads that aim 
to influence people to buy certain paints and . 
do certain kinds of painting, will betray him¬ 
self. Be sure your sins of omission will find 
you out. I remember one particularly fine 
series of advertisements I did for an agricul¬ 
tural implement firm. They were really 
bright. The only trouble with them, as my 
client very gently pointed out to me, was that 
they showed such little acquaintance with 


ADVERTISING MAN TALKS 181 


farm labor that any farmer would laugh at 
them. It seemed too bad to discard such clever 
writing for so prosaic a reason as that! Last 
year, when our firm took a contract to adver¬ 
tise Portland cement, I spent a whole month 
learning how it was made and digging up some 
points why that cement was the best to buy. 
I believe I could have made the stuff myself 
when I sat down to write the ads. It paid too. 

‘T have heard too much strong preaching 
for me to criticize preaching in general. More 
than that, I think that Christianity has re¬ 
ceived and is receiving the most effective pub¬ 
licity that has ever been given to anything 
under the sun. Yet I hear a lot of preaching 
in the course of a year’s travel that makes 
me think that some of the men who do it are 
in the same position that I was: they do not 
thoroughly know their article. 

^^Then some men seem to only know in spots 
the thing they are set to project. When they 
have preached on the texts, ^Servants, obey 
your masters,’ and, ^The powers that be are 
ordained of God,’ they have swung their whole 
circle. They are missing a whole lot of what 
we advertising men call ^good talking points’ 
on the social side of Christianity—points that 


182 


SKYLINES 


have a strong appeal and drawing power in 
that they make Christianity appear as a real 
part of what men want. I have listened to 
other sermons when for the life of me I could 
hardly tell whether the preacher was recom¬ 
mending ^righteousness, joy, and peace in the 
Holy Ghost^ or some particular brand of liter¬ 
ary criticism to be applied to the fourth chap¬ 
ter of the book of Daniel. Of course the effec¬ 
tive study of an article goes farther than the 
thing itself. It includes the materials of 
which it is made, the history and development 
of the business, and, above all, the services it 
can perform. ^What can it do better than 
anything else in the Avorld?^ is a fair question 
that both of us have to be able to answer on 
the spot, and answer convincingly. 

^^Kight along the same line—there is a vast 
amount of money wasted in advertising that 
is too vague and general to produce results. 
If a man is advertising Car ter ^s ink it does 
not help his client much to leave a general 
impression of ink in the public mind. He does 
not say merely, ‘Use ink,’ but ‘Carter’s ink 
is everlastingly black.’ It is almost impos¬ 
sible to do successful advertising for a busi¬ 
ness or product that has no distinctive features 



ADVEETISING MAN TALKS 183 


that can be stressed in a way to make it pre¬ 
ferred to all others, and I am sure you will 
agree with me that there are many sermons 
preached every week, interesting enough and, 
what is more, true enough, but wasted because 
vague. The appeal is not tied up closely 
enough to a particular thing—the definite ac¬ 
ceptance of Christianity. A man might listen 
to a great many sermons and get the idea that 
the Christian message was simply—^Be good.’ 
Gerald Stanley Lee calls it ^teasing men to be 
good.’ If you have no more definite message 
than that, you might as well save the money 
your space costs. ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ and thou shalt be saved’ is a message 
which covers all that is implied in the vague 
and general ‘Be good,’ but it brings a thou¬ 
sandfold more in inquiries and results. 

“There is the other big side to this, of course, 
and that is knowing the man we are talking to. 
My problem is always, ‘How will this strike 
Mr. Prospective Customer?’ and not, ‘How 
does it strike me, the advertising manager, or 
Mr. Jones, the president of the company?’ 
just as yours is, ‘How will this strike Brown 
the grocer and little Sallie Green?’ and not, 
‘How will it strike the professor of systematic 


184 


SKYLINES 


theology at the seminary?^ Yet a great many 
advertisements throw money to the winds be¬ 
cause written for the president and a good 
many sermons are w^ritten for ministers. It is 
not too much to say that the best national ad¬ 
vertising is the work of the ‘outside writer/ 
the man with the distinct point of view of the 
possible customer. A few years ago an Ameri¬ 
can house advertised in Chile using a picture 
of Santa Claus going down an ice-incrusted 
chimney. The weather in Chile at Christmas 
corresponds to summer in the United States 
and—worse still—the Chileans do not recog¬ 
nize Santa Claus. That was ‘inside work’ 
with a vengeance! And yet it was no worse 
than a church service, which Lyman Abbott 
says he once attended, where the minister was 
preaching to an audience of aged people and 
little children on how to choose a wife. The 
mission of both advertising and preaching is 
to develop states of mind, and the bull’s-eye we 
are both aiming at is to develop that state of 
mind which will almost involuntarily respond 
‘That’s right!’ to what we have to say. The 
only sure way of hitting it is to know the 
kinks in the other man’s mind by living with 
him. A successful department-store man 


ADVERTISING MAN TALKS 185 


makes it a rule to spend some hours on the 
street in front of the windows of his store 
watching the crowds, to see what they find in 
the windows that is of interest to them. He 
wanders around the sales counters listening 
to the remarks of the customers about the 
goods. Then he goes back to work prepared 
to avoid the pitfalls of the personal point of 
view. 

know another man who was advertising 
a washing machine and was unable to procure 
any response. One day he tried to put himself 
in the place of the typical buyer. As soon as 
he did this he concluded he would have to try 
a washing machine before he would buy. So 
came into being the well-known ^30-days’-free- 
triaP appeal, which proved a big success. I 
have to do a great deal of that kind of ^pastoral 
work’ if I am going to get results. Whenever 
I find that my inquiries are few, or that the 
cost of each inquiry is going up, it usually 
means that I have slowed up in my outside 
work and so am losing touch with the man I 
want to reach. I imagine it is much the same 
with you. The preacher who never rings door 
bells during the week rarely ever rings the 
bell when he shoots in the pulpit on Sunday. 


186 


SKYLINES 


biggest thing, though, that advertiS'- 
ing has to say to-day is that ^sensational’ ad¬ 
vertising is, with very few exceptions, poor 
business. That is something which has cost 
us millions of dollars to learn, but we have 
learned it. Most preachers have always known 
it, but some are still laboring under the delu¬ 
sion that attention is a thing to be valued in 
itself. Attention in itself is worth just about 
nothing at all. It must be favorable atten¬ 
tion. It is comparatively easy to attract at¬ 
tention, if one is satisfied with any sort of at¬ 
tention, but it accomplishes nothing if the ad¬ 
vertiser is regarded with derision or suspicion, 
as he will be when he adopts freakish or sen¬ 
sational schemes. Deceptive headlines, tricks 
of all sorts, have no persuasive value when 
once the reader becomes aware of the decep¬ 
tion. If you will read the back pages of your 
magazine carefully, you will notice that 
^smart’ writing in the advertising business is 
waning, and for a very solid reason: it doesn’t 
pay. What you as a preacher must achieve, as 
well as I, is not to have a man say ^What a 
clever piece of work!’ but to have him feel, 
That is something I want.’ Much advertising 
has been too ^cute’ and clever to succeed. It 


ADVERTISING MAN TALKS 187 


may be of use temporarily for a cheap article, 
but even there it arouses suspicion. A few 
years ago a firm with a three-thousand-dollar 
automobile to sell adopted a catchy and breezy 
style of advertising with great financial loss. 
It might have been useful in connection with a 
five-cent cahe of soap, but a man with three 
thousand dollars to put into an automobile is 
not going to be led to invest by sensational 
headlines. I have often thought of that in 
church when listening to some self-styled up- 
to-date preacher ^smartly^ discussing some sen¬ 
sational topic. A man who really takes Chris¬ 
tianity is getting an expensive thing. Its ini¬ 
tial cost is great and its upkeep calls for a 
large outlay in work and sacrifice and money. 
It takes more than bizarre headlines and spec¬ 
tacular performances to hold him. He has to 
be won and held by what we call ^reason why’ 
copy—straightforward and sincere. Probably 
the most spectacular advertising campaign 
ever waged in this country was that of a break¬ 
fast food a few years ago, its cost running into 
millions. It was striking in the extreme— 
humorous and grotesque. Its phrases were on 
the lips of everyone. But it was a financial 
failure. It got attention, but attention with- 



188 


SKYLINES 


out results is a poor prize. I know several 
ministers who think that by sensationalism 
they are keeping abreast of the times in the 
business world when, as a matter of fact, they 
are away behind the times. The trained ad¬ 
vertiser, while always reaching out for a fresh 
and strong point of contact, has put mere sen¬ 
sation aside as a childish and expensive toy. 

‘^An introduction is, as a rule, about as ex¬ 
pensive and dangerous a luxury for a sermon 
as for an advertisement. Get your point of 
contact, of course, but don’t loiter around do¬ 
ing any sight-seeing. When I come to New 
York every day I come to do business. I don’t 
want to get into a big red sight-seeing car and 
view Grant’s Tomb and the Palisades before 
going to the office. When I go to church I go 
for a purpose just as definite. I do not want 
to be taken on a sight-seeing tour of Palestine, 
as I frequently am by a long introduction 
which includes views of Mount Ebal and 
Mount Gerizim with a side light on the Moa¬ 
bites. It is all interesting enough, just as a 
tour of New York is a treat in itself, but it 
is just as far from the purpose. A keener 
sense of the value of a word will also cut down 
the number of ^display points,’ to use a techni- 


ADVERTISING MAN TALKS 189 


cal phrase, throughout the whole sermon and 
the use of ^stock illustrations.’ Much adver¬ 
tising loses force from having too many points. 
Cutting down the number of different points 
in a sermon is like making a good mar¬ 
riage, it ‘halves the troubles and doubles the 
joys.’ The beginner in my line is strongly 
tempted to make use of a good many stock il¬ 
lustrations—cuts—which can be secured from 
the electrotyper and which will fit in most any¬ 
where—but just because they do fit most any¬ 
where and are second-hand they are usually 
waste space. Not any more, though, than the 
stock illustrations in the pulpit. I could tell 
you off hand fifty illustrations which I have 
been hearing for years from the Atlantic to 
the Pacific, and which I will hear for the rest 
of my life, I suppose. These stock illustra¬ 
tions ought to be retired with all the honors of 
war. It is much the same with words. The 
curse of most advertising and some preaching 
is stereotyped, dry expression; saying things 
in the same words, or about the same words, 
that thousands have used and which only em¬ 
balm the remains of what was once a live fresh 
idea. A good part of the trouble is that many 
men who are physically active are mentally 



190 


SKYLINES 


lazy. Both advertising and preaching are full 
of this general monotonous language that is 
just words, words, words; no interesting facts, 
no fresh, life-like descriptions. 

^^There are a couple of other things we have 
learned at a big price. Most preachers have 
always known them, but I wish every one did. 
One is that the affirmative form of appeal is 
by far the biggest winner. There are effective 
ads which say ^Don^t do this,’ and ‘Don’t do 
that,’ but as a rule it is the positive affirmative 
ad that convinces, just as the positive sermon 
does. And the strongest appeal is the one that 
in some way or other reaches the emotions. 
The most effective advertisement ever used in 
America was the ‘Smiling Joe’ advertisement 
of the Sea Side hospital at Coney Island. It 
built a quarter-million-dollar hospital. It 
grasped the heartstrings of thousands with an 
irresistible pull because it analyzed one hun¬ 
dred per cent sheer ‘human interest.’ When¬ 
ever you can touch the emotions in a strong 
and legitimate way you reach—” 

“Chicago,” called the porter. 









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